This piece by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was originally published on The Next System.org.

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Why is this emerging mode of production so important in discussions about post-capitalist futures? And how can participants in commons-based peer production— the “commoners”—make sustainable livings, thereby creating a thriving global commons economy within and beyond capitalism?

Here’s why and how.

Introduction: Two big questions

When we investigate realistic social change, it is not enough to ask (normatively) how things should be or (idealistically) how things could be. We must also look at the seeds of potential change. Just as capitalism developed over centuries by combining such patterns as double-book accounting and knowledge diffusion through printing, any post-capitalist system will be grounded in patterns emerging within capitalism or from attempts to solve its systemic problems.

These post-capitalist patterns include commons-based peer production. John Restakis (2017), David Bollier (2016), and others have addressed the re-emergence of the commons, defined as a shared resource, maintained or co-created by a community, and governed through that same community’s rules and norms. Here we go one step farther, describing an emerging mode of production that makes the commons the central feature of its value creation and distribution.

This new modality of value creation has fresh but widespread roots. It emerged in the digital realm to organize the production of open knowledge, free software, and shared designs. Now, it is also a strong candidate to take over the organization of physical production and create a political economy in which the distribution of value is both more socially just and ecologically regenerative. As we will show, forces already afoot could produce and distribute value in socially fair and environmentally balanced ways.

Commons-based peer production as a new pattern of value creation for digital production

In commons-based peer production (CBPP), originally identified as a new pathway of value creation and distribution, Internet-enabled infrastructures allow individuals to communicate, self-organize, and co-create digital commons of knowledge, software, and design (Benkler, 2006; Bauwens, 2005; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014). Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad free and open-source projects (e.g., Linux, Apache HTTP Server, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress, Enspiral), or such open design communities as Wikihouse, RepRap, Sensorica, and Farm Hack. This remarkable new modality combines global coordination mechanisms with the small-group dynamics characteristic of human tribal forms, allowing these dynamics to go global.

Post-capitalist characteristics

CBPP differs fundamentally from value creation under industrial capitalism. In the incumbent models, the owners of the means of production hire workers, direct the work process, and sell products for profit maximization. Production is organized by allocating resources through price signals, or through hierarchical command harking to these price signals.

In contrast, CBPP is in principle open to anyone with skills to contribute to a joint project, pooling the knowledge of every participant. Some participants may be paid by companies or clients, but this system of production is also open to self-motivated contributors and distributors. In these open systems, there are many reasons to contribute beyond or besides receiving monetary payment.

CBPP allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations, but most important is the desire to create something meaningful or mutually useful to those contributing. For the productive communities as well as other users, most of their work is oriented to use-value creation, not exchange-value. In CBPP’s open and transparent systems, everyone can see the signals of others’ work and can that way adapt to the needs of the system as a whole.

Stigmergic collaboration

In CBPP, some commoners may be paid or employed as wage labor or work for the market as freelancers. Whether paid or not, all of them produce commons. The work is not directed by corporate hierarchies, but through the mutual coordination mechanisms of the productive community. Indeed, corporate hierarchies must defer to the community values if they want to participate in this type of production. In CBPP’s open and transparent systems, everyone can see the signals of others’ work and can that way adapt to the needs of the system as a whole.

CBPP is often based on ‘stigmergic’ collaboration. Basically, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication among agents and actions (Marsh & Onof, 2007, p. 1). Think here about how ants or termites exchange information by laying down pheromones (chemical traces). This indirect form of communication enables social insects to build such complex structures as trails and nests. An action leaves a trace that stimulates the next action by the same or a different agent (ant, termite, or, in the case of CBPP, commoner).

In the context of CBPP, stigmergic collaboration is the “collective, distributed action in which social negotiation is …mediated by Internet-based technologies” (Elliott, 2006). For example, free and open-source software code lines and Wikipedia entries are all produced in a distributed and ad hoc manner as large numbers of people contribute.

Of course, unlike termites and ants, people are given to ego problems, mixed agendas, and other human frailties, so what about quality control? CBPP projects do have quality-control systems based on a hierarchy (or heterarchy). These safeguards are imperfect but improving. Without coercing work, “maintainers” in free and open source software collaboration or Wikipedia “editors,” for instance, protect the integrity of the system as a whole and can refuse contributions that endanger that integrity.

Far from the norm in traditional business, this kind of collaboration does appeal to profit-seekers, too. Since CBPP is based on more freely engaged and passionate labor and obviates some costs to capital, it can appeal to for-profit forces. Hence, we see the massive growth of CBPP in software production for industry.

A new institutional ecosystem

Through CBPP, we see a new institutional ecosystem of value creation emerging. This ecosystem consists of three institutions: the productive community, commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalition(s), and the for-benefit association. Our description cannot be all-inclusive or definitive because each ecosystem is unique and this new mode of production is rapidly evolving. The aim instead is to offer a birds-eye-view of the expanding universe of CBPP.1

^{Five of the oldest and best-known commons-based peer production ecosystems.}

Along with Wikipedia and the well-documented ecosystems of the free and open-source software projects, Enspiral, Sensorica, Wikihouse, and Farm Hack offer new perspectives on the rich tapestry of proliferating CBPP ecosystems. All can be described as building new post-capitalist ecosystems of value creation, and all illustrate the shift from the purely digital production of software and knowledge to its use by entities that produce physical products and sophisticated services. Enspiral has a complex service offering, including the participatory decision-making platform Loomio, Sensorica designs and deploys sensors, Wikihouse produces designs for sustainable housing, and Farm Hack engages in the participatory design of agricultural machinery. All four replay the tripartite institutional structure emblematic of digital production. A recent study of the urban commons in Ghent (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017) shows that commons-based urban provisioning systems also exemplify this new structure.

^{Three emerging commons-based peer production ecosystems.}

The first linchpin of the new model is the productive community. It consists of all the contributors to a project of CBPP. As noted, its members may be paid or may volunteer their contributions out of sheer interest. Either way, all produce the shared resource. Most important when compared to systems based on wage labor, the system must remain open to contributions.

The second institution is the commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalition. It aims to create either profits or livelihoods by creating added value for the market, based on the shared resources. The participating enterprises can pay contributors.

The digital commons themselves are typically outside the market because they are not scarce so are not subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Crucially important in the relation among the entrepreneurs, the community, and the common-pool resource on which they depend is whether their relationship is generative or extractive. That said, every entity is expected to present a mixture.

Two distinctions are relevant here. First, entrepreneurship should not be identified exclusively with capitalism: not all entrepreneurs are motivated by profit maximization. For some, entrepreneurship expresses the desire for autonomy. In the emerging class of autonomous and precariously employed workers, many are involved in the “auto-entrepreneurship” crucial to CBPP ecosystems. Entrepreneurship should not be identified exclusively with capitalism.

Second, markets should not be identified with capitalism. Non-capitalist market systems that are not based on wage labor or the separation of the means of production from the workers, and that operate with different “value logics” than profit maximization, have existed throughout history. They still coexist within capitalism and can be further developed as post-capitalist modalities. CBPP’s potential here is to create commons-oriented market forms that both benefit the commons and the commoners.

Crucial to the “commonification” of the entrepreneurial coalitions is the figure of the “autonomous worker.” Today’s dominant conception of the entrepreneur is of someone who is independent and takes all the risk to play the capitalist lottery. In contrast, if you want a salary, then you need to obey corporate rules. So, if you are a worker, you have a contract of subordination. In contrast, autonomous workers are free to make their own decisions and interact with the market and the commons as they wish and without permission.

This form of self-propelled enterprise should not be confused with neoliberal entrepreneurship. From a Gramscian perspective (Gramsci, 1971), CBPP can be viewed as an effort to advance alternatives to dominant ideas of what is considered “normal” and legitimate. Commons-based entrepreneurship places freedom and autonomy associated with entrepreneurship in a contributory perspective.

Consider here the creation of the labor mutual SMart, which advances the concept of “autonomous worker.” Participating workers freely engage with the market to advance their values and life projects, but mutualize their life risk through a co-owned cooperative. Such workers are ideally situated to join more commons-centric models.

Marjorie Kelly (2012) introduces non-capitalist/generative enterprises, pressing the distinction between markets and capitalism. In these enterprises, collectively owned market agents use their surplus to further social and environmental causes, rather than accumulation. To demonstrate the difference between extractive and generative economic activity, think of industrial agriculture versus permaculture. In the former, the soil grows ever poorer and less healthy while in the latter the soil becomes richer and healthier.

Extractive entrepreneurs seek to maximize their profits, and few of this breed reinvest enough in the maintenance of the productive communities. Like Facebook, they do not share any profits with the co-creating communities that provide the company’s value and its realization. Some, like Uber or Airbnb, tax exchanges without creating transport or hospitality infrastructures. So, though such enterprises develop useful services based on previously untapped resources, they do so extractively. They facilitate these services, but they also create competitive mentalities that destroy the collaborative and environmental advantages of mutualizing pooled resources. Moreover, extractive enterprises may free-ride on social or public infrastructures (e.g., roads in Uber’s case) and further undermine welfare provision by evading taxation and failing to provide social benefits. To demonstrate the difference between extractive and generative economic activity, think of industrial agriculture versus permaculture.

In contrast, generative entrepreneurs add value to these communities, which they both seed and depend on. In the best case, the community of entrepreneurs and the productive community are one and the same. Creating livelihoods while producing commons, contributors re-invest the surplus in their well-being and the overall commons system they co-produce.

The third institution is the for-benefit association. This entity can be seen as the infrastructural organization of the commons that manages commons-based cooperation. Indeed, many CBPP ecosystems feature independent governance institutions that support the infrastructure for collaboration, empowering the CBPP. Cooperation thus takes place autonomously, without any command-and-control apparatus. Indeed, commoning is impossible without it. For example, the Wikimedia Foundation is the non-coercive for-benefit association of Wikipedia. Similarly, free and open-source software foundations often manage infrastructure and networks of projects.

Traditional nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations operate in a world of perceived scarcity. They spot problems, search for resources, and direct their resources toward solving the issues they have identified. This approach arguably mirrors the for-profit model of operating.

In contrast, for-benefit associations operate for ‘potential’ abundance. They recognize problems and issues but believe that there are enough contributors eager to help solve or resolve them. Hence, they maintain an infrastructure of cooperation that allows contributive communities and entrepreneurial coalitions to engage in CBPP processes vital for addressing these issues, without directly commanding the contributors. They protect these commons through licenses and may also help manage conflicts between participants and stakeholders, fundraise, and help build the general capacity needed to work in particular fields through, for example, education or certification.

The specific CBPP ecosystems are interrelated through their digital commons. Since the output of one project can be the input of another, CBPP can be seen as a grand ecosystem composed of diverse smaller ecosystems.

Overcoming the commons-capital contradictions towards an integrated economic reality

The nascent ecosystems described here are not sovereign in the current political economy, and all come with challenges and contradictions. For instance, Enspiral owes its business success largely to the distinct talent and skills of its members who are very competitive in their respective fields and who acquired skills and experiences from their education and occupations in such traditional institutions as universities, software companies, and financial firms. Beyond that, its area of expertise fills a niche in a developed market with low capital entry. Enspiral’s business model may be hard to replicate absent these factors.

Similarly, Sensorica and Farm Hack both face significant challenges concerning proper and comprehensive documentation of their processes and outputs, while WikiHouse is still striving to broaden the scope and reliability of its layouts and technologies. All the described projects, especially those entailing localized manufacturing, still rely substantially on cheap, mass-produced raw materials and components. Their business models, not yet fully defined, can sustain livelihoods for only a small number of active and highly dedicated contributors.

These caveats notwithstanding, don’t underestimate the importance of examples like those sketched here in solving urgent and neglected societal challenges. These new initiatives are gradually building considerable capacity to support this emerging commons-based political economy. Each case offers unique techno-social solutions, crystallizing a new socially embedded perception of value, defining new forms of organization and relationships to the means of production, and providing a new and more holistic representation of economic reality.

As these solutions mature and get adopted, replicated, and improved by other projects, this new economic reality could subsume and transcend today’s tumbling political order. Empowered by commoning, in time they will reshape and sublate the current contradictions and processes into a synthesized, concrete, commons-centric totality.

To be sure, the autonomous emergence and development of these seed forms are by themselves not a sufficient condition for social change. But they are a necessary feature of such change and their prefigurative function and power are vital to the success of any social change strategy. No conflict or crisis resolution can occur without reliance on these seeds of change.

From seed form to societal form

Make no mistake: the new models of production described here as an emerging institutional infrastructure at the micro level of concrete projects are also potential formats for a new post-capitalist political economy and civilization:

• The productive community at the heart of contributory value creation is also a model for a new type of civil society and for the central institution of a new post-capitalist economic and civilizational model. In this model of a productive civil society, citizens are also recognized for their contributions to society through CBPP.
• The entrepreneurial coalitions, which are generatively co-creating added value to the human and natural commons, are a model for a generative and ethical market.
• The infrastructural for-benefit associations are a model for enabling and empowering the state, which ensures the contributory equipotential capacity of its citizens and inhabitants.

Commons for the commoners, commodity for the capitalists

In CBPP, contributors create shared value through open contributory systems, govern their work through participatory practices, and create shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations. This cycle of open input, participatory process, and commons-oriented output can be considered a cycle of accumulation of the commons, and this cycle parallels capital accumulation.

At this stage, CBPP prefigures what could become a post-capitalist mode of production. It is a prototype since it cannot yet fully reproduce itself outside of mutual dependence with capitalism. Productive and innovative “within capitalism,” CBPP also has the capacity to solve some of the structural problems generated by capitalism—in effect, transcending it. That said, CBPP won’t be the new “total social reality” until it also engages in physical production. The new models of production described here as an emerging institutional infrastructure at the micro level of concrete projects are also potential formats for a new post-capitalist political economy and civilization.

As for capitalist competition, CBPP can spur innovation. Firms that can access the digital commons possess a competitive advantage over firms that use proprietary knowledge and rely only on their research (Tapscott & Williams, 2005; Benkler 2006; von Hippel, 2017). For example, by mutualizing the software development in an open network, firms save substantially on their infrastructural investments. In this context, CBPP could be seen as a mutualization of productive knowledge by capitalist coalitions.

This capitalist investment is not negative in itself. Instead, it is a condition that has increased society’s investment in a commons-oriented transition. Since CBPP solves some structural issues of the current system, capital and both productive and managerial classes gravitate toward it. Even though prolonging the dominance of the old economic models distorts CBPP, it simultaneously sparks new ways of thinking that undermine in that dominance.

Even so, the new class of commoners cannot rely on capitalist investment and practices. Marinus Ossewaarde’s and Wessel Reijers’s (2018) threefold observation rings true here: “(1)…through technologically mediated practices of digital commoning implicit and explicit pricing mechanisms can be realised, (2)…such mechanisms draw the practices of digital commoning towards the monetary economy, (3) which in turn affects the forms of resistance that are implied in practices of digital communing.”

In the end, commoners must render CBPP more autonomous from the dominant political economy. Eventually, the balance of power could then be reversed: the commons and its social forces would become society’s dominant modality, forcing the state and market modalities to adapt to societal requirements.

Reverse cooptation

Commoners should avoid situations in which capitalists co-opt the commons and head toward situations in which the commons capture capital and use it to build its own capacity. Such reverse cooptation has been called “transvestment” by Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb (Kleiner, 2010, 2016). In the case of CBPPs, value would flow from the capitalist market to the commons, using generative market practices whenever possible. Thus, transvestment would help commoners become financially secure and independent. Such procedures are being developed and implemented in seed form by such open cooperatives as Sensorica or the Enspiral network.

Sensorica is a collaborative network that develops sensors. It was officially launched in 2011 in Montreal, Canada, inspired by free and open-source projects and the forms of collaboration they entailed. Sensorica explicitly separates its production processes, which are commons-based, from its market operations, which are held by independent entities though controlled by the productive network. The network’s contribution-based accounting system logs every contribution by every project participant at every stage, from initiation to marketing. In turn, all revenue from marketable products is distributed back to those who have contributed to their production. By providing livelihood opportunities, Sensorica emancipates its contributors so they can commit more of their creative energy to commons-based productive processes.

As for structure, the Enspiral network consists of the Enspiral ventures, the Enspiral Foundation, and a community of professionals representing various domains and a broad range of competencies. The Enspiral ventures offer their products and services in the market, like any common enterprise, but their focus is on the social economy, and they mobilize in response to societal challenges. Through this process, they create commons (software, infrastructures, knowledge—most famously, Loomio, a web application that helps groups make decisions together), but also revenue and (in some Enspiral ventures) even profits. A portion of these funds is donated to the Foundation. The latter then uses a part of them to cover its operation, and the rest is reinvested to new commons-based projects through democratic procedures. When projects are externally financed, the backing companies typically redeem their shares once an agreed-upon level of return has been reached. This agreement, combined with democratic control, allows the companies to decide to reinvest profits in their social mission and/or new Enspiral projects.

Open Cooperativism

Open cooperativism is a working concept aimed at infusing cooperatives with the basic principles of CBPP (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014). Pat Conaty and David Bollier (2014) have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other.” To a higher degree than in traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives would statutorily be oriented toward the common good by co-building digital and/or material commons. This orientation basically extends the seventh cooperative principle—concern for the community (ICA, 2018). In contrast to traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives pool their digital resources (knowledge, software, designs), creating a multifaceted digital commons for other open cooperatives. So, open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities, adopt multi-stakeholder governance models, help create immaterial and material commons, and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

One way to understand open cooperativism is to look at how the medieval guild system functioned. A guild was an association of producers who oversaw the practice of their craft or trade in a particular geographical area. It had elements of a professional association, a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. Externally, guilds sold their goods or services in the marketplace, but internally they were fraternities and solidarity systems. In a commons-centric economy, such efficiency and solidarity could be achieved through open participatory systems that would connect producers and consumer/user communities, as community-supported agriculture does now. By this token, the models proposed below would intertwine contributors with various roles into one solidarity ecosystem.

Beyond the classical corporate paradigm

Here, six interrelated strategies for post-capitalist entrepreneurial coalitions are outlined. All aim to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices to establish open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

First, it is essential to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Although knowledge in digital form can be shared quickly and at low marginal cost, traditional firms may use artificial scarcity to extract rents from its creation. Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are sometimes made artificially scarce to generate extra profits (Kostakis et al., 2018). This is particularly galling when life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowledge are overpriced or unnecessarily scarce. Open cooperatives, in comparison, would refuse to generate revenue by making such abundant resources as knowledge artificially scarce.

Second, a typical CBPP project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute. For instance, in the free and open-source software projects, participants contribute code, create designs, maintain websites, translate text, co-develop the marketing strategy, and offer user support. In this setup, salaries based on a fixed job description may not be the most appropriate way to reward contributors. An alternative is open value accounting or contributory accounting: any income from contributions flows to contributors according to the points accrued from their meaningful participation in collective production. This model could be an antidote to the tendency in many firms for a handful of well-placed contributors to capture the value co-created by a much larger community.

Third, open cooperatives could secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “copyfair” licenses (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014). Today’s “copyleft” licenses—such as Creative Commons and the GNU Public License—allow anyone to reuse the necessary knowledge commons provided that changes and improvements are subsequently shared in that same commons. The hitch is that this framework fails to encourage reciprocity for commercial use of the commons or to foster a level playing field for commons-oriented enterprises. These shortcomings can be overcome through copyfair licenses that allow for sharing while also ingraining reciprocity. More particularly, these licenses preserve the right of sharing knowledge but predicate commercialization of any such knowledge commons on contributing to that commons. For example, the copyfair approach to licensing endorses the free and open-source software freedoms enshrined in the GNU Public License, but regulates profit-making potential. The Peer Production License is the first case of copyfair that restricts the usage of a digital commons to worker cooperatives (Kleiner, 2010). Further, the FairShares Association uses a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the general public but allows its members to use the content commercially.

Fourth, open cooperatives would use open designs to produce sustainable goods and services. For-profit enterprises often build planned obsolescence into products to maintain tension between supply and demand and maximize profits. Such obsolescence is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, open design communities do not have the same incentives to plan obsolescence (Kostakis et al., 2018).

Fifth, open cooperatives could reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises makes it hard for them to create a circular economy in which the output of one production process becomes an input for another. However, open cooperatives could develop ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains may enhance the transparency of production processes so participants could adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. There is no need for overproduction once the realities of the network become common knowledge. Open cooperatives could then move beyond exclusive reliance on imperfect market price signals and toward mutual coordination of production, thanks to the combination of open supply chains and open value accounting.

Sixth, open cooperatives could mutualize both digital and physical infrastructures. Despite the justified critique it receives, the misnamed “sharing economy” of Airbnb and Uber does illustrate the potential for matching idle resources. Co-working, skill sharing, and ride sharing also exemplify the many ways in which we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-governance, a genuine sharing economy could use resources far more efficiently, aided by shared data facilities and manufacturing tools.

Cooperative ownership of platforms can also begin to reorient the platform economy around a commons-oriented model. The six practices highlighted here are already emerging in various forms but need to be more universally integrated. In our estimate, the primary aim for fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value that is now feeding speculative capitalism and reinvest it in the development of commons-oriented productive communities. Otherwise, CBPP’s potential will remain underdeveloped and subservient to the dominant system.

The challenge of physical production and the creation of sustainable production

Typically, the need for capital is dramatically higher for physical production, which requires natural resources, buildings, machines, and people. Clearly, assembling networked individuals requires substantially less capital. Nevertheless, as noted, CBPP cannot be considered a full mode of production unless it integrates both digital and physical production.

Building on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies, new models of physical production are emerging. They can be codified as “design global, manufacture local” (DGML). What is light (knowledge, design), this logic goes, becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local and ideally shared. DGML demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation (Kostakis et al., 2018; Kostakis et al., 2015; Kostakis et al., 2016). Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled applications. DGML could recognize the scarcities posed by finite resources and organize material activities to conserve them. After all, since manufacturing is largely local, shipping costs are lower, and maintenance is easier. Manufacturers design products to last as long as possible under the DGML mantle, and knowledge and design are freely shared since there are no patent costs.

Already, we see a rich tapestry of DGML initiatives unfolding in the global economy that do not need a unified physical basis because their members are located all over the world. For example, consider the L’Atelier Paysan (France) and Farm Hack (U.S.), communities that collaboratively build open-source agricultural machines for small-scale farming or the OpenBionics project that produces open-sourced, low-cost designs for robotic and bionic devices or the RepRap community that creates open-source designs for 3D printers.

Cities around the world are partially embracing this shift, as evidenced in a study on the urban commons (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017). In Ghent, Belgium, nearly 500 urban commons were identified, a tenfold increase in 10 years, covering all the basic provisioning systems. Most of these commons-based forms, however, redistribute but don’t produce goods. For instance, car and bike-sharing schemes mutualize access to transport but do not manufacture the vehicles. Similarly, housing coops, co-housing, and community land trusts offer access to housing but do not “make” the housing.

A further limitation: Many generative projects remain fragmented and locally limited. As welcome as these initiatives’ rapid growth is, it’s not enough to turn the tide. Public-commons cooperation must be combined locally with community wealth building policies inspired by the models in Cleveland and Preston, UK. What’s more, transnational investment coalitions are needed to create global open depositories for setting up provisioning systems and mutual learning endeavors that are locally adapted but globally coordinated. Public-commons cooperation must be combined locally with community wealth-building policies inspired by the models in Cleveland and Preston, UK.

One fast-growing sector amid a more fundamental transformation is ahead of the game. It can create healthy food for urbanites, livelihoods for producers, multi-stakeholder governance systems involving both producers and consumers, and meaningful work in an integrated ecosystem. Indeed, 80 of the 500 projects identified in Ghent were food projects—organic farmers supplying food through various commons-based schemes. Such local agricultural production exemplifies CBPP’s next stage: the cosmo-local production of goods. This stage combines open global communities mutualizing production knowledge, distributed local production, and cooperative, generative organization of the productive ecosystem. The challenge—extending this model to the economy’s more capital-intensive sectors—is likely to require the commitment of both the public sector and the world of cooperative investment and financing.

The greatest challenge, however, remains creating sustainable modes of production. Kate Raworth (2017) has very usefully summarized what needs doing: fulfill humanity’s social needs without exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet and damaging the vital cycles and needed balanced ecosystems that sustain human life. Commoning is both green and efficient.

The commons will be a vital part of this strategy for human survival. Commoning requires pooling and mutualizing resources and infrastructures to replace the wasteful corporate competition that reflects the systematic externalization of social and environmental costs to keep expenses and prices as low as possible. In contrast, CBPP’s “collaborative advantage” is that it produces products and services for human need, at lower thermodynamic costs than capitalist production models (Piques & Rizos, 2017). For example, the associate car-sharing project in Ghent, Degage, uses 130 cars for 1,300 members, guaranteeing them full mobility while greatly lowering environmental costs. Studies of similar projects have shown that every shared vehicle can replace up to 13 private cars (Shaheen, 2017).

Commoning is both green and efficient. Commons-based organic food ecosystems do not pollute the groundwater, do not use toxic additives, and can use carbon-free transportation systems. As shown in the meta-historical comparisons of civilizational overshoots (Motesharrei et al., 2014), more equal access to the resources of life significantly reduces resource catastrophes and makes crisis periods less severe. Production models that use a “subsidiarity of material production” approach will dramatically cut transportation costs and needs while maintaining global cultural and technical cooperation.

The good news is that pioneering communities all over the world are developing many of the tools needed to make this shift. For example:

• open and contributive accounting systems, able to recognize and reward all contributions, not just market value, as pioneered by Sensorica and others,
• shared ecosystemic circular supply chains, as experimented by Provenance, the Oxchain research project, eventually using the eco-systemic shared accounting systems like the R-E-A system, integrated impact and/or biophysical accounting systems, allowing direct access to thermo-dynamic flows and expenditures, using “global thresholds and allocations,”
• non-ecologically destructive distributed ledger systems, such as the Holochain,
• token-based value systems, which allow programmable production based on various value logics.

Instead of conclusions: A drinking horn for the commons

In medieval times, drinking horns were often used by guilds communally to symbolize and promote conviviality, friendship, and solidarity among the members. These values proved of great importance to the prosperity of the guild (Rosser, 2015).

Needed now is a drinking horn for the commons to help make CBPP a dominant production modality. The guild system can inspire commoners looking for sustainable livelihoods. Our transitional vision includes commons-based networks of “neo-guilds” comprised of cooperatives and autonomous producers. These networks would produce value—a global commons for the commoners and the general public and a product to be sold to enterprises outside the commons.

The small-scale initiatives can now be influential on a larger scale, as nodes in a commons-based global network of local networks. Through digital commoning, grassroots initiatives can have both a local and global orientation: “the small and the local, when they are open and connected, can therefore become a design guideline for creating resilient systems and sustainable qualities, and a positive feedback loop between these systems” (Manzini, 2013). Hence, instead of “scaling-up,” CBPP initiatives are “scaling-wide.”

With a crisis of capital accumulation upon us, might a stream of value seek and find a place in the commons economy? Yes. Instead of the cooptation of the commons economy by capital through capitalist platforms that capture value from common enterprise (e.g., Facebook, Google, IBM), commoners can coopt capital inside the commons, and subject it to its rules. With a crisis of capital accumulation upon us, might a stream of value seek and find a place in the commons economy?

Much depends on whether we can pull off more sophisticated types of reverse cooptation. Commoners must create interconnected transvestment vehicles that admit capital disciplined by the new commons and market forms developed through CBPP. For example, “double-licensing” schemes require those who wish to capitalize to pay a license fee or join the commons-based neo-guild. This approach creates a flow of value from the system of capital to the system of the commons economy.

The ultimate vision for a new society is one of a civil society productive in its own right, not just an adjunct to the market and state. Under this new dispensation, the state enables free social production in a galaxy of interconnected, collaborative initiatives. True, CBPP does not solve many of today’s inequalities and systemic social unfairness, especially involving race and gender. Nor does it directly address the hidden environmental and social costs of digital technologies, which are energy-intensive throughout their life-cycle, from cradle to the grave. Also, low-wage laborers (often including children) work under inhumane circumstances so that ever more people in the advanced economies have access to cheap digital technologies. But these shortcomings and injustices can be addressed, and CBPP traces a unique grand institution dealing with value creation that is far removed from the catastrophic characteristics of modern capitalism. This connection to sustainability is likely to open up new spaces for a free, fair, and long-lived society.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this essay are based on the authors’ forthcoming open-access book (co-authored with Alex Pazaitis), titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, to be published by University of Westminster Press. It also builds on Bauwens M. & Kostakis V. (2016). “Why Platform Co-ops should be Open Co-ops.” In Scholz

T. & Schneider N. (eds) Ours to Hack and Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. New York, NY: OR Books, 163-166. Vasilis Kostakis acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 802512).

References

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Bauwens, M., & Kostakis, V. (2014). From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism. tripleC:JournalforaGlobalSustainable Information Society, 12(1): 356-361.

Bauwens, M., & Onzia,Y. (2017). ACommonsTransitionPlanfortheCityofGhent. Ghent: City of Ghent and P2P Foundation. Retrieved from: https://stad.gent/sites/default/files/page/documents/Commons%20Transition%20Plan%20-%20under%20revision.pdf.

Bauwens M., Kostakis V. & Pazaitis, A. (2018) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London. UK: University of Westminster Press. In press.

Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Bollier, D. (2016). Commoning as a Transformative Social Paradigm. The Next System Project. Retrieved from: https://thenextsystem.org/commoning-as-a-transformative-social-paradigm.

Conaty P. & Bollier D. (2014). Toward an Open Co-operativism: A New Social Economy Based on Open Platforms, Co-operative Models and the Commons. A Report on a Commons Strategies Group Workshop, Berlin, 27-28 August. Retrieved from http://commonstransition.org/toward-an-open-co-operativism/ (accessed on 10 June 2018).

Dafermos, G. (2012). Authority in Peer Production: The Emergence of Governance in the FreeBSD Project. Journal of Peer Production, 1 (1): 1-12.

Elliott, M. (2006). Stigmergic Collaboration:The Evolution of Group Work. M/CJournal:AJournalof MediaandCulture, 9(2) . Retrieved from: http://journal.media-culture. org.au/0605/03-elliott.php (accessed on 10 June 2018).

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Harhoff, D., & Lakhani, K. (2016). RevolutionizingInnovation:Users,Communities,and OpenInnovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Kostakis, V., & Bauwens, M. (2014). Network Society andFuture Scenarios fora Collaborative Economy. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kostakis, V., Roos, A., & Bauwens, M. (2016). Towards a Political Ecology of the Digital Economy: Socio-environmental Implications of Two Value Models. Environmental Innovationand SocietalTransitions, 18, 82-100.

Kostakis, V., Niaros, V., Dafermos, G., & Bauwens, M. (2015). Design Global, Manufacture Local: Exploring the Contours of an Emerging Productive Model. Futures, 73, 126-135.

Kostakis, V., Latoufis, K., Liarokapis, M., & Bauwens, M. (2018). The Convergence of Digital Commons with Local Manufacturing from a Degrowth Perspective: Two Illustrative Cases. JournalofCleanerProduction,197, 1684-1693. Retrieved from: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652616314184 .

Manzini, E. (2013). Small, Local, Open and Connected: Resilient Systems and Sustainable Qualities. Design Observer. Retrieved from: https://designobserver.com/feature/small-local-open-and-connected-resilient-systems-and-sustainable-qualities/37670.

Marsh, L., & Onof, C. (2007). Stigmergic Epistemology, Stigmergic Cognition. Cognitive Systems Research, 9(1-2), 136-149.

Masters, R. (1753/2011). TheHistoryoftheCollegeofCorpusChristiandtheBlessedVirgin MaryintheUniversityofCambridge,FromitsFoundationtothePresentTime. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Mateos-Garcia, J., & Steinmueller, E. (2008). The Institutions of Open-source Software: Examining the Debian Community. InformationEconomicsandPolicy, 20: 333-344.

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Pazaitis A, Kostakis V. & Bauwens M. (2017). Digital Economy and the Rise of Open Cooperativism: The Case of the Enspiral Network. Transfer:EuropeanReviewofLabour and Research, 23(2): 177-192.

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All web links were active on July 6, 2018.

• 1. These ecosystems have been thoroughly discussed by several studies. See indicatively Dafermos, 2012; Harhoff & Lakhani, 2016; Mateos-Garcia & Steinmueller, 2008; Weber, 2005; Benkler, 2006; von Hippel, 2017.

The post How to Create a Thriving Global Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Text: Lionel Maurel.  English translation: Pascasle Garbaye. See P2P Foundation wiki for original French version.

About

The purpose of this policy, proposed by Lionel Maurel, is to establish the governance principles in force within the association “La Coop des Communs” for the management of the rights to the productions of its members, in particular within the framework of the activities of its working groups.

The Coopyright proposal has the advantage of simply implementing a certain logic of reciprocity, but without having to write a new license, since everything is based on two already well-known Creative Commons licenses.

It’s about articulating:

• ”’Internal reciprocity”’: working groups remain free to choose whether and how their productions are made public.

Unless special circumstances warrant it and after approval of the board of directors of the association La Coop des Communs, they are by default placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution – No Commercial Use – No modification),

For the active contributors to La Coop des Communs, the reuse of workgroup productions would be carried out according to the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence (Paternity – Identical sharing).

The Coop des Communs does not ask the authors for an assignment of rights.

The groups will therefore have to deliberate on their uses.

• ”’co-management, between the groups and the association, of the uses according to whether or not they are the result of non-profit or limited-profit organisations”’.

In the case of lucrative commercial use, a fee may be charged. A non-profit or limited lucrative use should be exempt from royalty.

The system is made operational by the ability to discriminate against the non-profit sector and limited lucrativity. An international application could be based on the current interpretation of these terms in each country concerned.

Introduction

For several years, a debate is in progress on the opportunity to create new licences, which would be neither “free” licences (such as GNU-GPL type) nor “open” licences (such as Creative Commons type). Many proposals, based on the concept of “strengthened reciprocal licence”, have been elaborated. The first proposal, coming from Dmitry Kleiner, was the Peer Production licence and the Belgian Michel Bauwens worked out the concept of “Copyfair”, which is for him fundamental for a transition to “Commons Economics”.

He summarizes these ideas as follows:

Copyleft licences allow anyone to re-use shared knowledge provided that modifications and improvements are added to these same commons. It’s a major step, but we cannot ignore the need for fairness. When moving to production of physical objects which requires finding resources for buildings, raw materials and payments for contributors, the unimpeded commercial exploitation of these commons favours extractive models.

Thus, it’s essential to maintain the idea of knowledge sharing, but also to request reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of these commons, to open up a sphere of activity for ethical economic entities that internalise social and environmental costs. This could be achieved through copyfair licences, which allow full sharing of the knowledge but ask for reciprocity in exchange for commercialisation right.

Bauwens think that Copyfair licences are one of the elements that will allow to bridge the gap between the Commons approach and the cooperative movement, by renewing the latter in the form of “Open Cooperativism”.

The problem is that proposals are on the table for several years now, but they are slow to produce concrete results. Since many prototypes have been designed, none of these new licences have been, so far, adopted on a significant scale and it is difficult even to quote concrete examples of projects that would implement such principles.

I must confess that this “deadlock” could led me to think that a “design error” had been made and I expressed serious doubts about reciprocal licences (doubts that, to tell the truth, have not yet completely left me…). However, the reason for this delay is also the great difficulty of defining legally the concept of “reciprocity” which can have several different meanings, not always compatible with each other.

Things were there until I crossed paths, last year, with the association La Coop des Communs, which goal is to “create alliances between the Commons and the Social and Solidarity Economy”. It brings together researchers, SSE actors and activists from the commons, promoting an interesting mixing between these different cultures.

But, La Coop des Communs itself has been quickly confronted with the choice of a licence for its own productions. It appeared that this could be an excellent ground for experimentation to try to implement legally the idea of “reciprocity for the Commons” by establishing a bridge with SSE. These reflections led to a proposal – in which I participated – called Coopyright (a pun on the idea of “cooperative copyright”).

A presentation is on La Coop des Communs website, but I will take a moment to explain the specificities of this proposal and what it is likely to generate.

A synthesis to overcome previous blockages

Coopyright draws heavily on previous proposals (Everything Is a Remix !), trying to overcome their respective weaknesses

The main source of inspiration remains Dmytri Kleiner’s Peer Production Licence, which was devised from the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA licence. His idea was to “specify” the NC option (Not for commercial use), stating that only entities with a cooperative form can use the resource.

More precisely, Peer Production Licence formulates its “reciprocity clause” as follows:

c. You may exercise your rights for commercial purposes only if :

i. You are a company or a cooperative owned by workers (worker owned)

ii. All financial gains, surpluses and profits generated by the company or cooperative are redistributed to workers.

d. Any use is prohibited by this licence for a company whose ownership and governance is private and whose purpose is to generate profit from the work of salaried employees.

We are therefore in an “organic” vision of reciprocity. The aim is to be able to distinguish between commercial entities of different nature, leaving a free use to “cooperatives” while keeping the possibility to submit to authorization and royalties classical “capitalist” companies. The problem is that this clause is drafted in a very restrictive way and, as it stands, only a small number of cooperatives can meet these criteria.

This is well explained by the lawyer Carine Bernault in an article about reciprocal licences :

The organic criterion adopted (“a company owned by its employees or a cooperative”) significantly reduces the possibilities of exploitation for commercial purposes. Moreover, the licence doesn’t define the notion of cooperative. However, if we look at the French cooperative production companies or SCOPs as an example, they are particularly characterised by an allocation of “operating surpluses” which must benefit, at least 25%, to all employees. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a SCOP fulfils the conditions, laid down in the licence, to engage in a commercial exploitation of the work.

For those reasons, the Peer Production Licence is, in my opinion, more a “proof of concept” than a real usable tool, because if the general idea of an “organic” criterion is interesting, the scope of application of the licence is too narrow. It doesn’t even apply to all cooperatives and forget the multitude of other institutional forms that SSE can take (associations, mutual funds, ESUS, etc.).

The second source of inspiration is Commons Reciprocity Licence.

In this proposal, the idea is to move away from an “organic” conception of reciprocity to promote reciprocity “in action”. In this vision, regardless of the status of the actors, the aim is to allow the free and unrestricted use of the Commons for those who contribute in return to the Commons. It would produce a more flexible and less discriminating result, since any company can have access to the resource, as long as it participates in the maintenance of Commons. But, this type of proposal also has weaknesses (and probably even more serious than those of the Peer Production Licence): how say exactly what is a Common? And what constitutes a “contribution to the Commons”? Should these contributions be quantified and evaluated and if so, how? In their proposal, Miguel Said Viera and Primavera de Filippi suggest using BlockChain for resolving these difficulties, but personally, I am suspicious of this convenient Deus Ex Machina that constitutes the BlockChain currently. In this view the link between reciprocity licensing and SSE is removed, even if it has the merit of introducing the interesting concept of “reciprocity in action”.

A third source of inspiration has been the FairShares project supported by the association of the same name, developing a vision of reciprocity that could be called “institutional”. In their proposal, there is no need to invent a new licence, as their system works as a “switch” between two Creative Commons licences. The resources produced are available under licence CC-BY-SA (therefore with possibility of commercial use) for the members of the association who participate in its activity. For “outside” persons and entities, resources are licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND and commercial use is subject to royalties. The interesting point, here, is first of all the economy of means and the possibility to link up to Creative Commons, which are the best-known licences in the World. There is also a dimension of “internal reciprocity” implemented within the same productive community. But once again we lose the link with ESS, which was the strength of the Peer Production Licence.

There are interesting aspects in all of these proposals, but none seemed really satisfactory. Thus, to elaborate the Coopyright, the idea has been to integrate the different aspects of reciprocity found in all those licences, each one presenting an interest: organic reciprocity / reciprocity in act / institutional reciprocity / internal-external reciprocity.

Organizing internal reciprocity around two Creative Commons licences

The first need for La Coop des Communs was to determine the status of its own productions, knowing that the association is organized in working groups dedicated to given themes. In a first way, to give effect to the idea of reciprocity, it was decided that participants in the working groups could benefit from the productions of these groups under CC-BY-SA licence (thus, with the possibility of modification and commercial use and a share alike obligation), while these same productions would be opened to third parties under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This solution is based on the idea of the FairShares project, building on the proven Creative Commons licences, to avoid increasing the “proliferation of licences”. Personally, I have further doubts about the possibility for a new licence to break into a landscape already saturated with proposals, in which certain tools, such as Creative Commons, have become “standards”. It’s better to use existing licences to build a “reciprocity system” than to start from scratch.

Otherwise, this vision enhances the link between “reciprocity in action” and “institutional reciprocity” and, I think, it’s the only sure way to proceed. It’s too difficult to define abstractly what is a “contribution to the Commons”, because Commons themselves are too different from one another. Only individually, each Common can appreciate what could be a significant contribution to its functioning. As for La Coop des Communs, a person, who wants to strongly benefit from resources produced within the association, has to contribute to its operation by participating in one of its working groups. Maybe other Commons would have another way of defining “reciprocity in action”, but it seems to me that we could never escape an “institutional” definition of the contribution, for each Common.

Bridging the gap with SSE through “limited profit” criterion

By default, La Coop des Communs’ resources are made available under CC-BY-NC-ND licence, but it was decided that outside entities will be exempt from prior authorisation and royalties if they have non-profit or limited-profit activity.

The concept of limited profit is part of the SSE’s rich legal legacy, and, as a criterion, has several interests. It already allows to overcome some of the limits of the NC (non-commercial use) criterion of the Creative Commons. The latter, on which there is endless debate in the Open Source Software communities, is often accused of being too vague. But in reality, it’s not: it is rather extremely broad, since it is triggered when a resource leads to monetary compensation or the search for a “commercial advantage”. Therefore, it’s only a criterion of “commerciality”, excluding the purpose of the use and its context, which means that administrations or associations may be subject to it.

From this point of view, the advantage of the non-profit or limited-profit criterion is to reintroduce an “organic” logic into the assessment of the use. Indeed, legally, these are entities that will be recognized as for profit or limited profit. However, the sphere of limited-profit also overlaps with SSE: it applies, for example, to associations working in the Social economy or companies such as SCOP, SCIC and ESUS companies.

In addition, entities know with a good level of confidence if, whether or not, they are in the limited-profit sphere. Indeed, originally used by the tax authorities, this criterion enable to grant tax deductions and the associations know whether they are in limited profit compared to the tax system applicable to them. It’s even easier for entities such as SCOPs, SCICs and ESUS companies, because they are intrinsically considered to be in the sphere of limited-profit, because of their operating principles (this is particularly clear in the ESS definition adopted in the Hamon law). And we can add that this criterion also has an international dimension, because although the definition of limited-profit may vary from country to country, it can be found in most legislation. The result is therefore comparable to copyright in Creative Commons licences: certain “pivot” concepts on which licences are built (originality, reproduction, representation, moral rights, collective management, etc.) may vary from country to country, but this simply affects the interpretation of licences and not their validity
The use of non-profit or limited-profit criterion seems to me very interesting to test, because it is perhaps a way to overcome the excessive rigidity showed by the Peer Production Licence. Perhaps it could be a way to make a legal link between Communes and SSE, which will enable “Open Cooperativism” to take shape.

Still some limitations, but a potential to explore

Coopyright may not be a perfect proposal, but in my view, it has the potential to reopen the debate on reciprocal licences on a better basis than it has been engaged to date. And, in my opinion, it is urgent to resume this debate. More and more actors of the SSE and the Commons are meeting on the major question of “reinforced reciprocity”, but, for now, they don’t have effective legal tools to implement it.
Coopyright can probably contribute to this process and will be currently tested by La Coop des Communs, especially within its project “Plateformes en Communs” (a set of cooperative platforms which recognize themselves in the notion of Commons and includes a working group on legal issues which I am in charge of leading). Please, also note that the text of the Coopyright proposal has been posted on GitLab for comments.

For now, the main limit of Coopyright will probably lie in the field of objects where it could be applied. Built on a combination of Creative Commons licences, it is not suitable, for example, for software because Creative Commons licences were designed for intellectual works, such as music, movies, text, photos, etc. and the Creative Commons Foundation itself recommends not to use them for software. Moreover, it should not be difficult to adapt dedicated software licences to implement the same principles, but this work remains to be done. Otherwise, Creative Commons licences also have limitations when applied to hardware objects (I already mentioned this on this blog) and Coopyright itself does not allow exceeding this limit.

For now, another restriction is that Coopyright has been developed to meet the specific needs of Coop des Communs and this directly reflects on how “internal reciprocity” is expressed in the text (extended rights in return for participation in its working groups). But it would be quite simple, for entities that would like to use this tool, to modify the basic text to express otherwise what they consider to be a “significant contribution to their activity”, opening the benefit to more re-use rights than the default license. Coopyright text itself is under CC-BY-SA licence and, therefore, everyone could adapt it, according to its needs.

Finally, I think we could add a layer so that “reciprocity in action” could be recognised within a network of entities that have the same values. For now, this “reciprocity in act” is assessed in relation to the contribution to a Common (in this case, La Coop des Communs). Imagine a group of entities decide to use Coopyright for their resources: they could then want to “form a coalition” and, in a spirit of solidarity, consider that the contribution to one of the members of the network would open user rights on the resources of the other members. This would lead to the creation of a “common pot” of resources, with a “networked” appreciation of what “reciprocity in action” would be, on the basis of cross-institutional assessments.

In short, there are probably many things to imagine from these first ideas and feel free to share yours under this post or go do it on GitLab.

PS: one last thing, which is not completely insignificant. A license needs a logo to get visibility. If someone is able to imagine a logo that would express Coopyright’s values and operating principles in a graphic form, do not hesitate to leave a comment!

Photo by Jonathan Lidbeck

The post Coopyright: at last a reciprocal licence to make the link between Commons and ESS? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the banner of ‘platform cooperativism’, an emerging network of cooperative developers, entrepreneurs, labor organizers and scholars is developing an economic ecosystem that seeks to align the ownership and governance of enterprises with the people whose lives are most affected by them. This represents a radical critique of the existing online economy, but it’s also a field of experimentation for alternative forms of ownership design. This essay presents and analyzes some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that could serve the platform economy of the future differently than the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

Acknowledgments
This essay stems from an ongoing collaboration with Trebor Scholz, and while he is innocent of my oversights, I am indebted to his insights. The following has also benefited from the input and feedback of Devin Balkind, Josef Davies-Coates, Enric Duran, Daniel Hu, Brent Hueth, Tim Kuhn and Keith Taylor, in part through an open review process at https://ioo.coop.

On March 18, 2016, at a press conference with US Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez on his right and a platform user named Ty Lane on his left, Managed by Q CEO Dan Teran announced, ‘Over the next five years, Managed by Q will give 5 percent of the company to the operators working in the field’.¹ On the backdrop behind them, Managed by Q’s logo – a futuristic, sans-serif grey Q repeated over a black background, much like Uber’s U – evoked the company’s status as one of the many trying to be ‘the Uber for x’ – in this case, the Uber for office-cleaning. But Teran’s announcement represented a departure from Uber’s notorious disavowal of employment responsibility for its drivers, whom it seems impatient to supplant with self-driving cars. In addition to full-time jobs and benefits, Managed by Q was welcoming the platform’s worker-users as genuine co-owners.

Co-ownership has mostly been missing in the implicit social contracts of online platforms – the Internet-enabled, multi-sided markets that employ networked forms of connection and transaction to transform industries, workplaces and livelihoods (Parker et al., 2016). The principal owners of platforms, along with founders, have been the investors who inject capital in expectation of generous returns. Technology companies may offer stock options to early employees; users, in contrast, have been treated like external customers. Yet in many cases they don’t pay the company any money while contributing essential content (e.g., virtually everything one encounters on platforms like Facebook or Reddit), even entrusting to the platform their personal data and their livelihoods. Platforms train users to think of themselves as participants in ‘peer production’ (Benkler, 2007) and a ‘sharing economy’ (Schor, 2014). But the online economy’s ownership structures habitually fail to reflect either the platforms’ stated aspirations or their social realities.

Managed by Q’s directors, however, recognized that its office-cleaning ‘operators’ were a class of users that served as the company’s face to the office-owning clients who provided revenue; co-ownership, therefore, seemed like an appropriate way to incentivize operators to take their responsibility seriously. The announcement also made for good press.

Canonical notions of corporate structure and governance, even when they encompass a wide variety of stakeholders, tend to affirm the practice of granting ownership and control to investors, since they bear direct financial risk (Jensen, 2000; Monks and Minow, 2008; Parmar et al., 2010). But when platforms hold near-monopoly status and wield control over urban transportation networks or data about intimate relationships, their risk profile is more complex than a share price. Platforms increasingly act as infrastructure, enabling productive activity among users – from individuals to large organizations. They’re not just a means of production but a means of connection. These webs of dependency, however, have not reached the platforms’ boardrooms. Managed by Q’s experience, together with a growing body of research on cooperative models, suggests that platform builders may be missing out on opportunities shared ownership could present – from retention, loyalty and diversity among their users to untapped potential for financing and public benefit (Albæk and Schultz, 1998; Davidson, 2016; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Pérotin, 2016).

The platforms now vying for dominance have tended not to maintain high labor standards among user-workers and other contractors, even bending the law in the process (Scholz, 2016b, Slee, 2016). Platform-based workers typically lack the expectation of coverage for illness, injury and retirement. The allure is real, as platforms offer the possibility of independent livelihoods, a departure from the drudgery and discipline of an old-fashioned job. But platform owners enjoy the far more lucrative benefits of having a fluid workforce without a large, fixed payroll. Investor-owners have little to lose and much to gain from sidestepping the conventional responsibilities of employment.

Less visibly, the mismatch between the interests of platform owners and users presents itself in the realm of data. Ubiquitous platforms like Facebook and Google, as well as others that operate more discreetly, gather reams of data about Internet users and offer it as a product. This data supplies a growing surveillance economy based on targeted advertising and pricing, which, intentionally or not, easily bleeds into discrimination of already marginalized populations (Bernasek and Mongan, 2015; Couldry, 2016; Pasquale, 2015). Although a platform like Facebook may insist that users retain ownership of their data, immense and illegible service agreements grant the platform such sweeping rights over that data as to render user ownership close to meaningless. Additionally, the prospect that one’s online activity might affect a credit rating, or find its way into the database of a spy agency, has already dampened the free speech that the Internet once promised.

As the platform economy reorients how industries operate, it should also challenge taken-for-granted corporate ownership models. Cooperative ownership not only shares wealth more equitably among participants, but it also unlocks efficiencies by reducing the costs of transacting and contracting with an enterprise’s essential stakeholders (Bogetoft, 2005; Hansmann, 2000; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Taylor, 2015). Online platforms have yet to enjoy the value and benefits of this model. The time seems especially ripe to take up the challenge that Marjorie Kelly (2012) has described as ‘ownership design’: What ownership structures are appropriate, competitive and just for an economy orchestrated through platforms? How can corporate structure better align the feedback loops of actual online sociality?

One collective effort to address these questions, and one in which I have been involved, has come to be called ‘platform cooperativism’. As well as a rhetorical insurgency, this initative has opened a space of experimentation in online ownership design, taking inspiration from the legacy and ownership designs of the mostly offline cooperative movement. I will present and analyze here some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that may serve the platform economy of the future differently than have the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

‘The next sharing economy’

Cooperative economies of some kind have probably existed as long as human economies in general. But in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism, they have formed a distinct and transnational sector, with shared values and business practices of its own. From local food and housing co-ops to vast co-ops of farmers, retail stores, or electric utilities, this sector generates over $2.2 trillion in turnover worldwide, often in ways that serve needs unmet by investor-owned businesses.² It’s a part of the global economy widely relied upon yet overlooked, a ‘sharing economy’ before Silicon Valley adopted the term.

The prospect of platform cooperativism is at once new and old among the cultures surrounding the Internet. Early software and hardware hackers employed certain cooperative-like practices as they assembled the rudiments of the personal computer and the means of networking them. They shared source code; they developed structures of democratic governance across great distances; they resisted corporate enclosure in the process (Benkler, 2007; Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). Small groups of software developers have formed successful worker-cooperatives.³ Some of tech culture’s innovations deserve to be studied more closely by the offline cooperative movement, as they demonstrate the plausibility of, and some proven techniques for, highly distributed and productive self-management; many co-ops emerging among young people today are organized around tech culture’s flexible, networked forms of connection rather than recreating industrial-era jobs and membership societies. Platform cooperativism, therefore, is not starting from scratch in tech culture.

Still, true cooperative business models have been almost entirely absent from the online economy. One can at least speculate about the reasons why. The disruptive efficacy of the venture-capital financing mechanism has rendered it a go-to blueprint to the exclusion of other approaches. The technological sophistication necessary to build online enterprises has also proved prohibitive for the often-marginalized communities that tend to adopt cooperative strategies. And until recently the Internet could be considered an optional realm of activity; co-ops tend to appear when people have an unmet need, not to furnish a mere accessory or curiosity. But it is becoming harder and harder, around the world, to secure a livelihood without taking part in the online economy. Perhaps this is why, in the past few years, recognizable platform co-ops have begun to appear.

The Spanish collective Las Indias distinguished platforms as one type of cooperative in a 2011 blog post (de Ugarte). In 2012 the Italian federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto for ‘Cooperative Commons’, stressing the need for cooperative business models to manage the growing stores of data that users feed to online platforms.⁴ Stocksy United, a stock-photo platform owned by its photographers, went online the following year. By 2014, Janelle Orsi, founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, was calling for ‘the next sharing economy’⁵ – the sharing of cooperative ownership – and was helping to design the bylaws for Loconomics, a gig platform owned by its workers. I began documenting such projects in collaboration with the online newsletter Shareable (Schneider, 2014); meanwhile, drawing on the lessons of his Digital Labor conferences at The New School, Trebor Scholz coined the term ‘platform cooperativism’ as an alternative to the systemic abuses of investor-owned platforms (Scholz, 2014 and 2016a). In consultation with labor organizations and platform workers, Scholz and I co-organized the 2015 Digital Labor conference, ‘Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy’, and co-edited a subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own (2017). People around the world trying to develop online platforms through democratic ownership and governance began to coalesce their scattered efforts into a new economic ecosystem.

Since early 2015, along with Devin Balkind of Sarapis and others, I have maintained The Internet of Ownership⁶, the most exhaustive directory to date of the platform co-op ecosystem, and I lean heavily on that experience here. The directory includes not only ‘co-op platforms’ (which adhere to the International Co-operative Alliance’s standards for cooperative identity, detailed below) and various tools and organizations that support them, but also ‘sharing platforms’ (like Managed by Q) that practice shared ownership or governance with platform users, at least in part.

Platform cooperativism can likewise be taken to mean a broad invitation to a fairer online economy through shared ownership and governance; platform co-ops, however, are strictly those platforms that are also bona-fide co-ops by widely agreed-on standards (Sutton et al., 2016). The most recent revision of the principles that the International Co-operative Alliance holds,⁷ adopted in 1995, is as follows:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership
2. Democratic Member Control
3. Member Economic Participation
4. Autonomy and Independence
5. Education, Training and Information
6. Co-operation among Co-operatives
7. Concern for Community

To clarify these, the ICA promulgates the accompanying ‘values’ of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

Most of the cooperative principles resonate somewhat with the social contracts of the platform economy. ‘Voluntary and open membership’ is a default practice among platforms, which typically enable anyone (with access to requisite technology) to create an account; ‘autonomy and independence’, too, is a value that platform owners often assert while disrupting incumbent industries, even while proclaiming a well-meaning ‘concern for community’. There is much ‘co-operation’ among platform companies as well, such as through API protocols and standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium. Practices of ‘education, training and information’ often happen on platforms through much the kind of mutual education – in online forums and in-person meetups – that cooperatives encourage among their members.

The resonance, however, only goes so far. Principles two and three above – democratic governance and ownership, crucially – are almost wholly absent from the platform economy. Online user-experience design often seeks to divert users’ attention from matters of governance and ownership, such as by rendering opaque the processes of revenue generation through apparently ‘free’ services. Consultation with users on changes to features or policies is, at best, superficial.

Democracy itself has taken on a new meaning online. A Web search for ‘democratize internet’ or the like reveals that in tech culture ‘democracy’ has come to signify merely an expansion of access to various tools and resources, rather than the collective governance and joint stakeholdership to which the word, in other contexts, refers. That old kind of democracy is illegible to the Internet’s dominant ownership designs. The contention of platform cooperativism is that the design of platform businesses, and thus of the online economy generally, can and should allow for democracy in the fullest sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and cooperation won’t necessarily produce the appropriate response to every design challenge. But these kinds of designs are worth at least considering far more than they have been in the online economy thus far.

I hope I can be forgiven for leaving the necessary, important task of raising objections about the value and prospects of platform cooperativism to others. I look forward to learning from them. But it has seemed to me a better use of this space to offer a broad sketch of the movement’s progress. I hope, also, that the critiques of this nascent movement might come in the form of challenges rather than repudiations that could cut it at the root. It should be a foregone conclusion, but is too often not, that in a society that claims to be democratic, the advancement of democracy into new spheres of social life should be a question of how, not whether.

Ownership designs

In the following I introduce some of the design patterns (Alexander et al., 1977) that have so far arisen in the experimentation of platform cooperativism and related undertakings. Most of the projects referred to can be found in The Internet of Ownership directory, as well as the ‘showcases’ in Ours to Hack and to Own. I draw from published material on their websites and my conversations with their participants. While nearly all are too early-stage for a thoroughgoing evaluation, the patterns they embody at least trace the outlines of a new palette of options for ownership design in the online economy.

Work: Value creators as value owners

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which enables posting and carrying out piece-work tasks (tag some images, transcribe a recording, fill out a survey), gets its name from an eighteenth-century curiosity in which a human chess player sat discreetly inside a machine, dazzling the public and contemporary notables alike with its apparently mechanical intelligence. The reference is too apt for comfort; the human beings working on Mechanical Turk appear through the platform almost as if they were just another algorithm. Starting in 2014, these workers mounted a widely publicized email-writing campaign called ‘Dear Jeff Bezos’, alerting the Amazon CEO to the fact that ‘Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment and open communication’.⁸

Workers on Mechanical Turk, for instance, enjoy no minimum wage or ability to rate the behavior of the pseudonymous employers who meanwhile rate theirs. And while this case is egregious, it is not unique. In 2016, as many as 24 percent of US adults reported earning income on platforms (Smith, 2016). The prevailing platform business model is to achieve scale while reducing labor costs and interference in management, automating tasks wherever possible.

Platform cooperativism inclines toward another approach, one in which the people contributing value co-own the platforms and help decide to what ends they operate. The aforementioned Loconomics, for instance, is a platform co-op for short-term gigs in which the workers are co-owners; unlike ‘Turkers’, who rarely receive replies from Amazon when they submit complaints, Loconomics is designed to benefit from worker participation in governance. Its worker-owners invest in the platform through periodic dues. Also in the San Francisco area, the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West union is backing the Nursing and Caregivers Cooperative, through which the nurses collectivize and co-mange the terms under which they deploy their labor on their app, NursesCan. The stock-photo platform Stocksy United, incorporated as a Canadian cooperative, has found that including the photographers as members (alongside staff and founders) is a way of recruiting more talented contributors than might otherwise be possible, and of prioritizing artistic quality over ruthless expansion.

Part of securing fair work-lives on platforms is the development of ‘portable benefits’ that don’t rely on any one employer, but that better suit the promiscuous connectivity of a platform economy. This, too, is a job well suited to co-op models – hearkening back to the cooperative mutuals that gave birth to the modern insurance industry. The Freelancers Union in the United States and SMart in Europe are membership organizations that have delivered benefits to many thousands of independent workers, relying heavily on online tools. This kind of model, often in cooperative forms, is proliferating rapidly (Conaty et al., 2016).

The storied successes of twentieth-century worker cooperativism – such as the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy – sought to secure full-time industrial jobs. But many in the latest generation of co-ops seem designed to free their members from the need for a job altogether. Prime Produce, for instance, is a cooperative co-working space in New York City that prefers the language and ethic of ‘craft’ over ‘work’; the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral aspires to redefine work as ‘stuff that matters’. ‘Open companies’ (such as Gratipay, a crowdfunding platform) or ‘open value networks’ (such as Sensorica, which develops scientific instruments) have sought to rely on no employees at all, but to create products by rewarding the contributions of participants through a distributed platform. In Barcelona and the surrounding region, the Catalan Integral Cooperative draws member-owners in first by facilitating freelance work, and then by enabling them to obtain food, housing and services through internal trade and mutual credit rather than relying on euros. Some of its members have been involved in creating FairCoop, which proposes to do much the same on a global scale by connecting local ‘nodes’ through online tools, including a cryptocurrency called FairCoin (Schneider, 2015b).

Platforms need not regard those who contribute value through them as temporary stand-ins for algorithms. By orienting their business models around such contributors, platforms can provide not only decent livelihoods, but also a means of bypassing dependency on employment relations altogether.

Data: Treat it like it’s someone’s stuff

Much as Mechanical Turk disguises value-contributing workers behind a platform, business models based on so-called ‘big data’ often seek to disguise the fact that they’re capturing value from those contributing it. Facebook, for instance, provides extensive privacy controls by which users can customize what other users see about them – few of which affect, however, what Facebook itself sees, records and claims license to monetize. The economic power and promise of large pools of human data depend on the relinquishment of certain ownership rights by the humans involved, such as through opaque service agreements. These pools, in turn, can become outsourced repositories for government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

What would less duplicitous ownership designs for data look like? Commodify.us, for instance, has pioneered a model by which users can download a copy of their data from Facebook, then re-upload it, selecting which license they would like to apply to each data set – allowing them to monetize their data on their own terms. A more developed version of that general idea is TheGoodData, a London-based co-op, which allows users to monetize their browsing data with a browser extension and donate the proceeds to charitable causes. Meanwhile, under the aegis of MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, an ambitious initiative called Solid (‘SOcial Linked Data’) proposes a framework for a new species of social applications based on modular, consensual data-sharing agreements, granting users granular control over what they share.

Given the centrality of trust and ownership in matters of data, particularly highly personal data, cooperative business models may be especially well suited to building data economies that are both transparent and competitive. Starting with highly sensitive medical data, the Swiss platform MIDATA.coop is developing a business model for personal data storage based on cooperative ownership and governance, together with secure open-source software. In the United Kingdom, a research project called OurData.coop is exploring the potential for a widespread system of such data co-ops, through which people could both retain control over and selectively monetize data that they produce.

A further use-case for data co-ops is in practicing the sixth cooperative principle of cooperation among cooperatives. Already, established co-ops like Ringlink Scotland (which supports agricultural business development) facilitate data-sharing among their members. Newer projects, such as the U.S.-based Data Commons Cooperative and CoopData.org, seek to provide platforms for data-sharing among co-ops that can help them find each other and work together. The promise of big data need not depend on ambiguous or misleading ownership arrangements.

Code: Keep the lords’ hands out of the commons

At least since the Charter of the Forest that accompanied the Magna Carta, people who live by and co-manage common resources have found the need to protect them from the acquisitive tendencies of those at the top of the social pyramid (Linebaugh, 2009). In order to protect the code-sharing habits of early hacker culture from the proprietary urges of corporations and universities, Richard Stallman inaugurated the Free Software movement with the GNU Public License in 1989. This and similar ‘copyleft’ licenses were quintessential hacks, turning intellectual-property law against itself by employing an author’s copyright privileges in order to liberate her code into a commons, free for anyone – with the requisite skills, equipment and time – to use, adapt and improve. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig pioneered the transfer of this same hack to non-software cultural production through the array of Creative Commons licenses (Bollier, 2008). The accomplishments of this movement have been remarkable; copyleft practices have insinuated themselves into the modus operandi of the mainstream tech industry, creating many billions of dollars worth of freely available, world-class software in the process.

The tradition of hacking intellectual-property law, however, has not extended to the challenge of hacking corporate structure and corporate profits; as a result, there has been a disconnect between production, governance and ownership. The terminology of ‘open source’, which emerged about a decade after Stallman’s GPL, advertised collaborative code-sharing as an opportunity for low-cost, crowdsourced corporate innovation. Many of the large open-source projects now operate through foundations guided and funded by corporations that benefit from the community-developed code. Google, for instance, has been able to redeploy the open-source Linux kernel as Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, which also happens to be an effective tool for transmitting lucrative user data to the company’s proprietary databases.

The leading online peer-production communities, like Wikipedia and Linux, have also remained troublingly homogeneous, with low rates of participation among women and (at least in the United States) non-white ethnicities. Explanations for this in such communities range from instructive to denialist. But the reality is that those engaged in peer production must either be paid to do so or have surplus leisure time – a surplus that less-privileged populations are less likely to have (Dryden, 2013). By relinquishing ownership of intellectual property to this kind of commons, peer producers may have actually amplified some of the inequalities of the society around them, while allowing corporations to reap the profits. Corporate-led open-source development, too, has cultivated highly sophisticated back-end tools while leaving the features that are user-facing – that is, customer-facing – far less well developed, rendering them unable to compete with commercial counterparts.

Many of platform cooperativism’s early advocates have been advocates, too, of Free Software and the open-source movement. Stallman, as well as Free Software partisan Micky Metts, spoke at the 2015 New School conference. Some insist that platform cooperativism should include a commitment to the exclusive use and production of the GPL and similar licenses. Others in the community have embraced a new generation of intellectual-property hacks specifically attuned to corporate ownership design as well as the intellectual property itself.

Dmytri Kleiner’s Telekommunist Manifesto (2010) outlined a proposal for a ‘Peer Production License’, which adapted the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license by adding a clause that permits commercial use by worker-owned enterprises that distribute surpluses solely to the worker-owners. If Linux were licensed in this way, Google couldn’t make use of it but a worker-owned company developing mobile devices could. Lost is the mainstreaming effect of corporate adoption, but the value conjured by peer-producers is not so easily captured by capital. Co-ops gain a competitive advantage. The Peer Production License has been promoted by P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens (in Scholz and Schneider, 2016), and the platform co-op Guerrilla Translation has adopted it as a general policy – though it remains marginal and largely untested in practice.

A more restrictive experiment in license innovation is the ‘Co-op Source License’ of the Co-op Source Foundation, a software-development platform co-op.⁹ This license assigns profits from commercialized software to contributors based on “commitment level and peer review.” CoMakery, while not itself a cooperative, is a startup developing a tool for distributing profits in this kind of arrangement with the aid of blockchain technology.

Even without adopting additional restrictions, platform co-ops have sought to develop new strategies for connecting the immense value in the open-software commons with end-users. Snowdrift.coop, for instance, is a cooperative platform designed to provide sustainable financial support for projects that contribute to such commons; platforms like this could incentivize open-source developers to focus more attention on user interfaces that can compete with closed-source alternatives.

Platform cooperativists seek to add a more fair and explicit economic layer to peer-production, prevent corporate value capture and facilitate cooperation among cooperatives. Some of the more restrictive proposals could come at the cost of losing the broad user and contributor base that corporate adoption can offer. Yet each of these experiments represents a plausible innovation in its own right as well as a constructive critique of the Free Software and open-source legacies.

Protocols: No decentralization without representation

Defenders of a free and open Internet also cherish the network’s decentralized design. While working at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s, Paul Baran developed the concept of distributed packet-switching as the basis of a communication system that wouldn’t rely on any single node that could be vulnerable to Soviet attack (Baran, 2002). Despite notable exceptions such as the Domain Name System, this distributed logic pervades the Internet’s protocols. The liberating promise of decentralized networks, in turn, seems to have inclined Internet denizens to seek further liberation through further decentralization. Technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing have allowed users – by relying on no central server – to share copyrighted music and video files without interference from the copyright holders. Platform cooperativism is in a sense a call for decentralization as well, in particular the decentralization of ownership.

The Internet as many people experience it has become remarkably centralized. They gain access through the monopolistic broadband providers that have replaced the small-scale, local ISPs that were common in the days of dial-up (although some regions co-own their broadband through cooperative utilities). Much of their online lives takes place through a small number of monolithic companies such as Facebook and Google – which track browsing habits through cookies, embedded buttons and mobile surveillance. But decentralization is also undergoing a revival, as early Internet architects like Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle call for re-decentralizing the Web.¹⁰ These initiatives seek to challenge the centralized platforms with a new generation of decentralized protocols. The cryptographic blockchain technology that enabled the Bitcoin digital currency system, meanwhile, makes possible a bewildering array of decentralized possibilities, from a replacement for the Domain Name System (e.g., Namecoin) to ‘distributed autonomous organizations’ made of ‘smart contracts’ (e.g., Ethereum). Advocates revel in the ambition of a ‘trustless’ ‘decentralized society’ that cryptography will allegedly enable (Frank, 2015). And in many respects the promise is real.

Bitcoin, however, has become a cautionary tale. While the underlying cryptography has held up according to spec, the social outcomes are less encouraging. Wealth distribution in the Bitcoin economy is massively stratified – much more so than in the conventional economy – and a small cabal of ‘mining’ pools have come to dominate the creation of new coins and the governance of the system. In effect, Bitcoin has become centralized yet ungovernable.

The urge to decentralize and distribute authority across networks risks neglecting the necessary work of reconstituting that authority in democratic ways. But decentralization and democracy can go hand in hand, too. For some years now, federated social networks like Diaspora, Friendica and GNU Social have implemented features familiar to users of Facebook and Twitter through decentralized networks of independently owned and governed nodes. I am a member of the ‘democratic membership organization’ May First/People Link, which finances, owns and manages a GNU Social node; my data for the network is managed, therefore, by an organization accountable to me, while enabling me to interact freely with the global network. This model, while less lucrative for investors than a centralized social network, is well suited to democratic organizations. Scale occurs through the protocol, not the platform.

The democratic potential of blockchain technologies, also, is considerable – even if it has rarely prevailed in practice. While Ethereum smart contracts could implement a digital autocracy governed by an absolute monarch or an unaccountable robot, they’re just as capable of facilitating highly democratic structures. Some projects have turned to cooperative models to solve problems that vex other blockchain systems; Rchain uses a co-op as a means of scalability, while Moeda turns to credit unions as partners for expanding financial inclusion.

To those who regard decentralization as a liberatory end in itself, platform cooperativism adds the qualification that having a decentralized system doesn’t remove the challenge of governance – it just alters where and how governance takes place. For decentralization to have democratic consequences, it needs democratic design.

Finance: Rent capital, don’t be rented by it

Some assume that cooperatives are incompatible with large-scale financing, that they must forego the growth and innovation that investor ownership enables. A glance at the global cooperative sector, however, belies this. It is true that cooperatives cannot cede the powers of governance and ownership that investors typically expect, but in areas where co-ops have flourished, they have formed quite formidable financial institutions – such as credit unions and cooperative banks – to hold capital and make it available to the sector for growth. José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragon Corporation, insisted that co-ops have a responsibility to capitalize: ‘A cooperativism without the structural ability to attract and assimilate capital at the level of the demands of industrial productivity is a transitory solution, an obsolete formula’ (2013).

Rather than ruling out the possibility of financing, cooperative models require a different kind of ownership design in their financing schemes than businesses that invite investor control. Thus far, however, the online economy has relied on a venture-capital investment model based on granting considerable rights to early investors, followed by an eventual ‘exit’ through either selling the company to another company or trading shares on speculative markets. For platform cooperativism to take hold as a live option for enterprises, other designs are needed.

Loomio is a New Zealand-based worker co-op that produces a popular online decision-making platform. Venture capital was not an option, and the team members considered adopting non-profit status, but found it incompatible with their ambitions for scale. By early 2016, however, they had raised a round of $450,000 from investors who supported their mission and regarded their worker-owned structure as adequate assurance. The investors purchased non-voting, redeemable-preference shares, assuring a return based on the company’s revenue without compromising its cooperative model. While the investment remains a modest one by Silicon Valley standards, it beckons toward more sizable promise.

Cooperatives were, in a sense, the original crowdfunding, allowing communities to self-fund enterprises that served them. And while online crowdfunding has been an effective enabler of new initiatives, it lacks the shared ownership of co-ops. New platforms want to bring that back. Seedbloom is building an blockchain-based equity crowdfunding tool, enabling contributors to become co-owners of the projects they support; it has already helped enable the development of Resonate, a cooperative music-streaming platform owned by fans, musicians, and labels. Open Collective, while not a cooperative, is a crowdfunding tool that enables groups to form online cooperatives and manage their budgets without need for formal incorporation or a bank account. Tools like these can help significantly lower the barriers to co-op formation.

A vibrant platform co-op sector will require a variety of financing mechanisms. Purpose Ventures is an emerging investment firm designed from the start to specialize in ‘self-owned’, ‘purpose driven’ companies that seek sustainable growth, not a rapid exit; as the companies grow, their success enables new companies to join a mutually supporting ecosystem. FairCoop is attempting to create a global cooperative financial system with several concurrent mechanisms, including its own cryptocurrency, a mutual-credit network, a savings service and a variety of mission-driven funds.

A further source for platform co-op investment is the existing offline cooperative sector. While some large, well-capitalized co-ops have begun investing in platforms, they often face a learning curve in doing so. Just as the tech sector has yet to learn what it takes to systematically develop co-ops, the cooperative sector must learn how to apply its financial resources and know-how online. One promising approach may be to forge collaborations between successful tech accelerators and cooperative financial institutions.

What unites these various forms of cooperative-friendly financing is how they reverse the conventional corporate model, in which capital rents workers’ time and seeks to extract profit from customers. In co-ops, online and off, participants find capital when they need it and rent it without relinquishing their business in exchange.

Education: Train owners, not just workers

The promotion of education has been a pillar of cooperative enterprise at least since the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers’ famous store in mid-nineteenth-century England, and it remains a basic principle for the global cooperative movement. Business shapes the people who engage in it as an implicit education; cooperativism seeks to make that education explicit, and to educate members as informed, empowered stewards and owners. Some of the world’s most important co-op networks, including the Mondragon Corporation and the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, grew out of schools. It is an irony of Silicon Valley’s history that Leland Stanford, founder of the tech industry’s flagship university, was a passionate advocate of cooperative enterprise and included in his Grant of Endowment a directive ‘to have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation’; it’s an intention that the university, and the tech industry it helped spawn, has largely ignored (Altenberg, 1990).

In Scholz and Schneider (2016), a chapter by Karen Gregory asks in its title, ‘Can Tech Schools Go Cooperative?’ By ‘tech schools’, she refers to the recent proliferation of unaccredited, often for-profit ‘bootcamps’ that offer intensive curricula designed to produce students ready for well-paying jobs for software companies in a matter of only weeks or months. Gregory proposes, instead, a kind of tech school that sets the bar higher, to ownership: ‘a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing and worker agency’. Gregory calls for locating such schools in public universities, for the sake of accessibility for populations currently underrepresented in tech jobs. New programs in cooperative business at public institutions – such as the City University of New York and Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California – are currently in development, but by and large their orientation is toward offline cooperatives.

A model partly along the lines Gregory describes, meanwhile, has emerged through the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral, which is home, among other enterprises, to Loomio. In 2014 members of the network formed Enspiral Dev Academy, a coding school that equips students with marketable skills while also introducing them to the opportunities for co-ownership in Enspiral itself. The academy offers scholarships and priority for applicants from underrepresented populations (as some more conventional tech schools do as well). Likewise outside the sphere of public education, the educational arms of cooperatives like Mondragon Corporation and Co-operatives UK offer distance-learning programs that could prefigure platform co-op models for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the like.

Whether in public or private forms, education will be an essential component of a platform co-op sector. Some of the most important education likely takes place through the platforms themselves, in the ways by which a platform presents itself to members as a medium of co-ownership and elicits from them responsible decision-making and stewardship.

Governance: Kumbaya won’t do

In co-ops and investor-owned companies alike, shared governance can turn into a caricature. Those with limited experience in the cooperative sector might assume that just because an enterprise is, say, legally owned by its workers, cumbersome consensus-based processes must be the norm. And in companies where the workers are not owners, managers might try similarly cumbersome performances to instill a fictional ‘sense of ownership’ intended to encourage more productive behaviors. Platform cooperativism has challenged both versions of superficial communalism by seeking to align appropriate ownership and governance structures rather than hiding one behind the other.

The task of efficiently balancing the stakeholdership relationships of the platform economy is far from straightforward. Traditional lines that distinguish worker-owned, consumer-owned, or producer-owned co-ops tend to blur in a platform economy where much of a platform’s value comes from the contributions and resources of people who are not the company’s employees. Many emerging platform co-ops have opted for multi-stakeholder models that encompass various classes of co-owners, such as employees, users and customers. The FairShares model, for instance, is a recent effort to facilitate and codify a multi-stakeholder structure. Platform co-ops like Loconomics, Resonate and Stocksy United use multi-stakeholder structures for both ownership and governance.

There are lessons to be drawn from the distributed governance models of foregoing tech culture. Open-source software communities have developed sophisticated governance practices, ranging from the formality of the Debian Constitution, which manages a popular version of Linux, to the free-for-all of an IRC channel. These hackers’ commitment to transparency, also, can offer correctives to a cooperative movement that has too often been opaque, even to its members. Holacracy and sociocracy are governance structures that conventional companies have used to distribute authority and empower employees; they’re even better suited to cooperative models in which that empowerment extends to ownership of the company itself.

Experiments that have emerged from civic and political innovation have proved useful for economic democracy, too. Loomio – which translated the decision making processes of Wellington, New Zealand’s 2011 Occupy encampment into a platform – serves as a primary governance tool for Enspiral and other co-ops worldwide, along with schools, government programs and businesses. The ‘liquid democracy’ model pioneered among alternative political parties in Europe and South America could be well-suited for large-scale platform co-ops.

There is potential for governance, also, in the now-reflexive daily practices of online platforms – Facebook ‘likes’, Reddit ‘upvotes’ and so forth. These features of user experience could become the rudiments of meaningful shared governance. If this were the case, we might see a reduction in the often careless behavior found on social media. Could the Reddit uprising of 2015, which ousted a CEO, have proceeded more constructively if Reddit users had levers for self-governance besides conspiring to shut down the platform?

Not every wheel of governance must be reinvented. For all the radical governance models on offer, platform co-ops need not necessarily reject every practice that conventional platform companies already employ – while retaining the significant difference that the managers are ultimately accountable not to outside investors but to the platforms’ actual participants, as well as to the communities in which participants live.

Policy: Local value for local benefit and control

Confronting the platform economy’s onrush of disruptions, policymakers have found themselves in the position of trying to say ‘no’, in various and sometimes futile ways, as they attempt to retain appropriate control over their economic infrastructures. Ride-sharing platforms destabilize structures for taxi regulation, and room-renting platforms unsettle tourism policies. Both bypass established compromises in labor relations. Industries that were once more or less locally governed and owned are now orchestrated from the platforms’ headquarters far away – and those platforms’ investors insist on taking a sizable cut. Platform cooperativism gestures toward a new set of options to consider, toward something policymakers can say ‘yes’ to.

Co-ops have long represented this kind of constructive alternative, and in many parts of the world their flourishing has been made possible through proactive policy. In the United States, for instance, the Department of Agriculture provided grants and loans for the creation of electric utility co-ops in rural areas that investor-owned companies opted not to electrify, starting in the 1930s; today, federal agencies have begun helping some of those same co-ops offer user-owned broadband service. Co-ops are a tool not only for meeting needs that capital markets fail to meet, but for doing so justly, in a way that keeps wealth among the constituencies that create it. To this effect, Michel Bauwens and others have theorized the ‘partner state’ as a framework for governments that enable, but do not control or direct, the flourishing of cooperative and commons-oriented enterprise (Kostakis and Bauwens, 2014). The city of Barcelona has taken early steps to enshrine platform cooperativism into its economic strategies. And in August 2016, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto’ that included ‘platform cooperatives’ among its eight planks.

In her statement for the 2015 Platform Cooperativism conference,¹¹ New York City Council member Maria del Carmen Arroyo wrote, ‘Worker cooperatives offer a viable method to address the long-term challenge of reducing the number of chronically unemployed and underemployed residents and the number of workers trapped in low-paying jobs’. To this end, she had already supported legislation to fund worker-cooperative development in the city, as well as steps toward preferential treatment for co-ops in city infrastructure contracting. She added that platform cooperativism ‘can put the public in greater control of the Internet, which can often feel like an abyss we are powerless over’. Another City Council member, Ben Kallos, made a last-minute appearance at the conference to announce his proposal for a ‘Universal E-Hail App’ with an open protocol that would level the competition between taxis and ride-sharing drivers.

Taking the example of the accommodations-rental platform Airbnb, Janelle Orsi has proposed three kinds of cooperative alternatives, outlining a distinct role for government in the ownership design of each (Schneider, 2015a). What she calls ‘Co-bnb’ would be a co-op owned by the renters of rooms in a given area; ‘Munibnb’ would be owned and operated by cities as a public good, enabling them to set controls and caps on short-term rentals; similarly city-managed, ‘Allbnb’ would add the principle of redirecting the profits from the platform back to residents as dividends, recognizing the fact that, when visitors come, their hosts are all the city’s residents, not just those from whom they rent a room.

Such municipal ownership models have been pioneered by so-called ‘sharing cities’ such as Seoul, South Korea, which has restricted certain platforms while promoting the development of local alternatives. Municipal ownership is not strictly cooperative – it violates the cooperative principle of ‘autonomy and independence’, among others – but this approach recognizes that, as stewards of common infrastructure, governments are essential stakeholders in the platform economies that rely on such infrastructure to operate.

When a business serves the role of organizing and enabling the transactions throughout an entire sector of the economy, it has historically been regarded as either a monopoly or a public utility. Just as the monopolies of connective railroads inspired the U.S. antitrust laws of a century ago, a recognition is growing that new strategies of enforcement, and perhaps new laws, are needed to regulate the emerging online super-platforms (Khan, 2016). Enabling transitions to more democratic ownership designs may be a way to help these platforms better self-regulate, rather than inviting more stifling regulatory regimes.

Designing for the future

Cooperatives have often formed from a posture of reaction, of meeting unmet and essential needs, rather than anticipating desires or advertising them into existence. The growing movement for platform cooperativism, too, has tended toward imagining co-op versions of existing models, rather than wholesale innovations. While conservatism can be a strength and a source of stability, it will also be a liability in an evolving online economy of capital-rich enterprises competing for winner-take-all market share. Leading offline cooperatives have made a point of investing in innovation, and platform co-ops will need to do so all the more. To this end, Trebor Scholz has formed the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School to orchestrate research and funding specifically for this emerging sector. The Internet of Ownership maintains a library of legal templates and bylaws. And research initiatives like the EU’s P2Pvalue project are starting to incorporate platform cooperativism into their work as well. Such efforts face plentiful challenges.

Among the most visible platform co-ops in development, for instance, are cooperative taxi companies vying to compete with the likes of Uber. Companies like Green Taxi Cooperative in Denver, Alpha Taxis in Paris and ATX Coop Taxi in Austin are betting that they can provide better service with drivers fully committed to their work through various degrees of equity sharing, combined with their own app-based hailing technology. In the short term this strategy may have promise. However, Uber’s longer-term outlook appears to be premised on an eventual transition to self-driving cars – and an economy in which human driver-owners could turn into a cumbersome liability.

The question at hand, really: How do we cooperativize robots? It’s a challenge for domains well beyond transportation. The ‘internet of things’ – the growing industry of automated, networked gadgets, from watches to home temperature controls – poses problems of trust and surveillance that cooperative ownership could be especially well suited for, but only if they move into that new market quickly enough. Platform co-op researchers need to investigate more deliberately what potential innovations and business models investor-owned companies aren’t seeing because of the limitations of their own ownership structures.

Matters of intellectual property ownership take on fresh urgency as people invite artificial intelligence more fully into their lives through systems like Amazon’s Alexa. Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman, among others, have formed an organization called OpenAI to develop open-source artificial intelligence technoloegy, but, as with open-source software generally, this does not prevent value from flowing mainly to corporate investors. Peter Barnes (2006), on the other hand, has suggested that those who monetize our information commons could pay fees that would be redistributed equally to the population in the form of a universal dividend. And a team of computer scientists has proposed a preliminary model for artificial intelligence owned by the people whose data-labor trains it (Sriraman et al., 2017). The nature of democratic ownership design for a more automated future is by no means obvious, but investor control need not be a foregone conclusion.

Finally, an honest platform cooperativism should extend its gaze beyond the platform economy itself to its material substrates – in particular, the human conditions surrounding the mineral extraction and assembly of the hardware on which platforms depend. This has been neglected territory for the emerging platform co-op ecosystem, which has remained software-oriented. But there are some promising points of departure to consider. Fairphone is a Dutch smartphone, available in Britain through The Phone Co-op; it is designed with an ethical supply chain in mind, including decent working conditions and conflict-free minerals. The Indonesian co-op KDIM is building its own locally produced smartphone. In China, Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications hardware manufacturer, is significantly employee-owned – though it is neither a formal co-op nor a model for worker rights. Perhaps platform co-ops, by building other co-ops into their supply chains, can help set high standards for sourcing and labor. Further research is needed, however, to develop more democratic ownership designs for the hardware, natural resources and human labor on which any future platform economy will depend.

Ownership transitions

What would it take to have an economy in which a can-do entrepreneur with an idea for a platform – the kind of person who wants nothing more than to create something new and excellent and receive some fair compensation for succeeding – will conclude that her best way to proceed is by practicing democracy? The answer, of course, is that it would take a lot of things at once. Ownership design is best considered a process of open-ended choices, based on patterns that we test and apply iteratively. Integral to the designs themselves, therefore, are the processes for instantiating them.

There are two basic kinds of co-op development: startups and conversions. Startups that begin as co-ops from their inception have the chance to hard-wire cooperative values into their structures and cultures; they typically rely on the widespread recognition of an unmet need. Conversion, meanwhile, involves transitioning an existing enterprise to democratic ownership and governance, combining a proven business model and its existing momentum with a structure better aligned to serve the people who rely on it.

Startups might come in several forms. Some will be bootstrapped – drawing on existing communities of users to finance and populate a platform that meets their needs, perhaps through equity crowdfunding. Along these lines, venture capitalist Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures envisions a new generation of less risky ‘skinny platforms’ that deliver lower returns to investors and higher returns to labor. He told Shareable in 2015, ‘We can generate a return participating in that, and we think that’s what we should be doing’ (Geraci, 2015). Other kinds of startups, meanwhile, might spin off from existing cooperatives, online or off, perhaps connected by a federation or other forms of ongoing cooperation. For instance, the German cooperative marketplace platform Fairmondo is spreading to the UK through the aid of two existing cooperatives – Fairmondo itself and Worth Cooperating in the UK – with the intention of creating a freestanding multi-stakeholder co-op. Rather than growing as a multinational company, they’re replicating and sharing a common pool of open-source software.

Conversions, too, can come in various forms. One is a mature-stage transition. Especially when a product is unproven or lacks a ready community of users, a cooperative structure may not be the appropriate ownership design early on; it makes sense, then, that forward-thinking founders and investors should hold the risk, as well as the opportunity for reward. Once a community of users forms, however, the nature of the business changes, and cooperative ownership models become more appropriate – such as to govern labor policies or the use of personal data. A loyal and active community can provide founders with a fair return for their early innovation and investment; shared ownership, meanwhile, can help keep that community loyal and active and interested in their platform’s success. Another kind of conversion – more speculative and challenging, to be sure – could take place once a platform has achieved the sort of ubiquity that makes it, in essence, a monopoly-utility. For instance, as former Harvard Library director Robert Darnton contends (2009 and elsewhere), Google Books has created a unique and essential information commons by scanning and making available documents that may never be scanned again; a company whose chief responsibility is shareholder profit, however, does not seem to be the appropriate steward for an archive of such immesurable value. Similar concerns in the platform co-op networks have spurred a ‘BuyTwitter’ campaign, which calls on the company to convert to some form of user ownership. A new generation of antitrust policy might finance and aid transfers of platform ownership to the users who depend on them. Cooperative models are both proven and adaptive enough to merit consideration as we design and adopt – so far with too little foresight – the platform utilities of the twenty-first-century economy.

The extent of platform cooperativism at present remains limited to a rallying cry, a few success stories, and a cluster of far-flung, early-stage experiments. Merely saying that it should take hold more widely, as we advocates have attempted to do, is not enough to overcome the formidable barriers of financing, market access, public education and competition that this kind of model faces. Even a brief glance at the existing, offline cooperative economy – the credit unions, the electric utility co-ops, the farmers’ marketing and supply firms – makes clear that a more cooperative online economy would not guarantee utopian outcomes. But the achievements of past co-op sectors do at least suggest that such models are capable of scaling to reach and shape significant portions of economic life. When they do so, they furnish more resilient, institutionally diverse societies, impacting the behavior of non-cooperative enterprises as well as the lives of their members.

Insofar as platform cooperativism has been a scholarly project, it introduces questions that have been too often neglected in research on internet cultures and economies. How are platforms owned and governed, and how could they be owned and governed differently? How does their ownership shape the platforms’ structures of accountability? How do ownership models organize and limit the kinds of technologies available to people?

Thankfully, this has not been merely a scholarly project, but a participatory one. The emerging experiments have not merely followed the path called for or imagined by theory. That dynamism only reinforces the supposition, however, that when we reorient systems of ownership and governance toward democracy, transformative things can occur.

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Photo by Photographing Travis

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UCL/IGP: 

Boost basic services to counter ‘rise of the robots’ – report

• Extension of NHS principle to cover housing, food, transport and IT would boost incomes of those most at risk of job automation and growing inequality
• £42bn cost represents just 2.3% of UK’s GDP – and could be paid for by changes to tax system
• System would preserve incentives to work while building a more cohesive society
• Questions? Want to collaborate with us? Email [email protected]

The UK should provide citizens with free housing, food, transport and IT to counter the threat  of worsening inequality and job insecurity posed by technological advances, a report launched by the Insitute for Global Prosperity recommends.

The proposal for ‘Universal Basic Services’ represents an affordable alternative to a so-called ‘citizens’ income’ advocated by some economists, according to the expert authors working for UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity.

Building on the ethos that saw the establishment of the NHS and public education – that essential services should be free at the point of need – the plan would “raise the floor” of basic services all citizens can expect, providing better protection for workers in the face of rapid advances in technology and automation.

Outlining the research, Professor Henrietta Moore, Director of the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, said: “If we are to increase cohesion, the sense that we are ‘all in it together’, we must act where we can have the greatest impact and that is on the cost of basic living.”

The recommendations include a massive expansion of social housing, free bus travel, meal provision for those most at risk of food insecurity and basic phone and internet access. The total cost of £42bn – representing just 2.3% of UK GDP – could be fully funded through changes to the Personal Allowance, making the proposal fiscally neutral.

The services themselves might be provided publicly, by private companies, or by the voluntary sector and would need to be democratically accountable locally to prevent state monopolies.

Those in the lowest income decile would benefit the most – saving the equivalent of £126 per week in costs as a “social wage” if they accessed all the Basic Services. A “social wage” is the value of a public service to an individual citizen, expressed as replacement for financial income.

Critically, the report demonstrates clearly that UBS would be a far more affordable response to the changing nature of the labour market than a ‘citizens’ income’, also known as Universal Basic Income (UBI).

A UBI paid to all UK citizens at the current modest Jobseekers Allowance level of £73.10 per week would cost just under £250bn per year – around 13% of total GDP, or 31% of all current UK public spending. By contrast, the transformative effects of UBS are accessible with relatively minor changes to the fiscal structure of the UK economy: additional UBS spending represents only 5% of existing budgets.

Most plans for basic income include keeping the existing public services in place, and distributing cash in addition to the cost of services. Focusing on more comprehensive provision of services rather than giving cash handouts also means there remains a strong incentive on citizens to work.

Professor Moore and the report’s co-authors – Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College London, Andrew Percy of the IGP and Howard Reed, director of the economic research consultancy Landman Economics – add that an important aspect of UBS would be the opportunity it could give to rejuvenate local democracy and local involvement in the design, financing and delivery of local services. And they also suggest that UBS could be complementary to a modest basic income.

One recent report by McKinsey estimated that almost half (49%) of the activities people are paid almost $16 trillion in wages to do in the global economy have the potential to be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technology in robotics, machine learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Henrietta Moore, Director of UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity, said “Without radical new ideas that challenge the status quo, we face a future where the changing shape of our society and labour market leaves more and more people struggling simply to achieve the basics – let alone having the resources and mental energy to allow themselves and their families to flourish.

“As a society, we already accept that certain services like health and education should be provided free at the point of use to the whole population, because we understand that all of society benefits as a result. The concept of UBS is a logical extension of this principle.”

Andrew Percy, the IGP’s citizen sponsor for the research, added “The safety net of a society must be just as modern as its economy. Universally available public services have the potential to provide the flexible, need-specific, and responsive support that could replace much of our current, conditional benefits, while also preserving the value of paid work, conforming with public attitudes, and building social institutional fabric at the same time.

“It cannot be sufficient to excuse hungry school children or an uncared-for elderly population with a notion of ‘unaffordability’ in a society that is as rich as any that has ever existed.”

Professor Jonathan Portes of King’s College, London, said “The role of the state is to ensure an equitable distribution of not just money, but opportunity to participate and contribute to society. For that to be meaningful, there are likely to be certain services everyone should be able to access.

“UBS, like basic income, has the potential to improve work incentives, especially for lower paid workers. It reduces the cash income required, through the benefit system or from savings, for individuals or families to survive at an acceptable standard of living if they have little or no income from labour; and if services are provided to all regardless of work status, then there is no disincentive effect from the loss of access as people move into work or increase their earnings.”

Responding to the launch of the UBS report, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer John McDonnell said “Rapid technological changes are a profound challenge for our economy and society. This report offers bold new thinking on how we can overcome those challenges and create an economy that is radically fairer and offers opportunities for all. It makes an important contribution to the debate around Universal Basic Income, and will help inform Labour’s thinking on how we can build an economy that truly works for the many not the few.”

UBS in detail:

The Universal Basic Services (UBS) modelled in the report build on existing universal healthcare, education and legal services. They would enable every citizen to live a ‘larger life’ by ensuring access to safety, opportunity, and participation. Reducing the Personal Allowance to £4,300/year (leaving the current benefits system in place as is) would make UBS revenue neutral, and be highly progressive.

• Shelter: doubling the existing social housing stock by funding the building of 1.5 million new social housing units using 30-year Treasuries at current market rates. The new units would be offered on a needs basis at zero rent. All social housing would be exempted from Council Tax, and include a utilities allowance. With a seven-year building schedule the costs start at £6.1bn and finalise at £13bn from the 7th year onwards.
• Food: A food service would provide one third of the meals for the 2.2 million households deemed to experience food insecurity each year. This would add to existing programs such as free school meals and meals on wheels, providing 1.8 billion meals at a cost of £4bn per year.
• Transport: Extending the existing Freedom Pass (currently for citizens over the age of 60) to everyone for bus services, providing access to free local public transport services that enable citizens and residents access to jobs, education, healthcare and participate fully in their community – all of which are currently under threat. Assuming an increase in use of 260% the cost would be £5bn per year.
• Information: To promote digital inclusion, this covers the cost of basic phone, Internet and the BBC TV licence fee. This would enable access to work opportunities and other services, as well as participation in our democracy as informed citizens. This is the most expensive service considered, with an annual budget of £20bn, however it also delivers universal value across all income groups and keeps all citizens connected in our increasingly digital world.

Key facts – Why UBS?

• According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in 2015/16, 14 million people were in relative low income after housing costs (22%), up 500,000 from the year before. Relative low income is based on those living below 60% of median income.
• According to End Child Poverty, 4 million children in poverty in the UK, and this figure is projected to rise to 5 million by 2020 as further social security cuts come into force.
• In 2016/17, the Trussell Trust gave nearly 1.2m three-day emergency food supplies to people in crisis.
• Research by Shelter has found that typical new homes built today are out of reach for over eight in ten (83%) working families living in private rented accommodation across the country – even if they use the Government’s Help to Buy scheme.
• Data from the ONS shows that between 1980 and 2014, the real cost of motoring, including the purchase of a vehicle, declined by 14%, while bus fares increased by 58% and rail fares increased by 63% in real terms (i.e. accounting for inflation).
• According to Ofcom, 9% of UK adults have difficulty paying for a communications service (phone or internet), rising to 14% of younger people (aged 18-34).

A copy of the full research paper on Universal Basic Services can be downloaded here.

UCL Institute for Global Prosperity

UCL’s Institute for Global Prosperity was set up in 2014 under the leadership of the renowned sociologist Professor Henrietta Moore. Its remit is to rethink social and economic models to tackle the major challenges facing the world in the 21st century as it grapples with climate change, resource depletion and a rapidly growing human population.

Questions? Collaboration? Please email us at [email protected]

Press Contact: James Tout, Journalista, [email protected]

Photo by Daniel Frese from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/berlin-building-business-city-574177/

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This monopoly right is supposedly necessary to incentivize authors to create new works, whether they be software code, recorded music, books or photographs. The assumption is that people won’t create without copyright protection and that all creative works must be bought and sold in the marketplace.

But what if a creator wants her work to be freely copied, shared and re-used?

Copyright law makes no express provisions for allowing such nonmarket uses. This fact that became painfully evident when the Internet became a mass medium in the 1990s and people suddenly wanted to share things online for free.

Richard Stallman, a legendary hacker, was one of the first to devise an ingenious solution to the limitations of copyright law. Stallman wanted his fellow software programmers to help improve the code he was writing and to be able to share the results widely. Stallman also wanted to make sure that no one could take software programs private by claiming a copyright in them.

His pioneering solution in 1989 was a “legal hack” known as the General Public License, or GPL, often known as “copyleft.” A work licensed under the GPL permits users to run any program, copy it, modify it, and distribute it in any modified form – without obtaining advance permission or making a payment. In practice, the GPL provides legally enforceable protections to works developed by large communities of coders.

The only limitation imposed by the GPL – and it is key – is that any derivative work must also be licensed under the GPL. This means that the terms of the GPL – the rights to copy, share, modify and reuse – automatically apply to any derivative work, and to any derivative of a derivative, and so on. This was a brilliant legal hack because it inverted the automatic privatization of content under copyright law, instead requiring automatic sharing. The more that a program is shared, the larger the commons of programmers and users!

The GPL has proven hugely significant over the past twenty-six years because it ensures that the value created by a given group of commoners will stay within the commons. People can contribute to a software program such as GNU Linux, the famous computer operating system, with full confidence that no one will be allowed to “take it private.”

The success of the GPL in the 1990s and early 2000s inspired law professor Lawrence Lessig and a band of fellow law scholars, activists, techies and artists to extend the idea of the GPL to other types of copyrighted content. Once again, the goal was to promote the legal sharing of content. But in this case, the focus was on texts, music, photography, videos, and anything else that can be copyrighted.

In 2002, a new organization, Creative Commons, launched a suite of six standard licenses to facilitate the sharing of such content. Creators were invited to choose what types of copying and sharing they wish to authorize for their works. The “Attribution” license (known by the abbreviation “BY”) allows copying so long as the author is given proper credit for the work. The NonCommercial license (NC) authorizes free reuse so long as the new work is used only for noncommercial purposes. The ShareAlike license (SA) authorizes free reuse so long as the new work also uses the same SA license (that is, derivative works must also be freely useable – similar to the terms of the GPL). A NoDerivatives (ND) license authorizes free reuse so long as the new work does not alter the original work. Any of these licenses can be mixed with others, creating new licenses such as an Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The CC licenses have been wildly successful in helping unleash the power of copying, imitation and sharing. Thousands of open access scientific journals now use CC licenses to make their contents available to anyone for free in perpetuity.¹ Music remix and video mashup communities have flourished. Countless websites and blogs make their content freely accessible, which in turn encourages people to contribute their own talents. According to a report released by Creative Commons in February 2015,² the number of CC-licensed works worldwide in 2014 was 882 million – up from an estimated 50 million works in 2006 and 400 million works in 2010. Nine million websites now use CC licenses, including major sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, Public Library of Science, Scribd and Jamendo.

In recent years, there has been mounting frustration with the limits of the GPL and Creative Commons licenses in promoting the creation and protection of commons. Paradoxically, the more shareable the content under these licenses, the more capitalist enterprises are likely to use the “free” content for their profit-making purposes. The classic example of this was the widespread embrace of GNU Linux and other open source software programs by IBM and dozens of other major tech companies. While hackers are pleased that no one can “take private” the code they have worked on, companies are pleased they can use high-quality bodies of software code available at no cost.

This situation is certainly an advance over conventional proprietary software, which does allow any sharing or modification. Yet it still falls short of creating a commons in which the contributors are able capture the value of the work (whether monetary or otherwise) and to protect the integrity of their social commons over time.

To address the limitations of the GPL and CC licenses, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, working with hacktivist Dmytri Kleiner, developed the idea of commons-based reciprocity licenses, generically known as CCRLs or “CopyFair.” These licenses are specifically designed to strike a middle ground between the full-sharing copyleft licenses (such as the GPL and the Creative Commons Non-Commercial license) and conventional copyright law, which make creative works and knowledge strictly private.

The idea is to replace licenses that do not demand direct reciprocity from users, with licenses requiring a basic reciprocity among users in a commercial context. Bauwens and his colleagues are in the process of developing a Peer Production License that would explicitly allow commercialization of a creative work or body of information, but only if the creators, as copyright holders, are able to share in the gains. Bauwens envisions the PPL as a reciprocity license that would serve worker-owned co-operatives and online communities of creators. An early version of the PPL is currently being used experimentally by Guerrilla Translation, a Madrid-based activist/translation project, and the PPL is being discussed in various places, especially among French open agricultural machining and design communities.

As Bauwens explains, “The PPL is designed to enable and empower a counter-hegemonic reciprocal economy that combines commons that are open to all who contribute, while charging a license fee to the for-profit companies who want to use without contributing to the commons. Not that much changes for the multinationals. In practice, they can still use the code as IBM does with Linux, if they contribute. And for those who don’t contribute, they would pay a license fee, a practice they are used to.”

The practical effect of the PPL, says Bauwens would be “to direct a stream of income from capital to the commons, but its main effect would be ideological, or, if you like, value-driven.”

The PPL should not be confused with the Creative Commons NonCommercial license, which is used by creators who do not want their work used for commercial purposes. That license halts economic development based on open, shareable knowledge and keeps it in nonprofit spheres. But the PPL is intended to allow the commercialization of works developed on open platforms of shared knowledge so long as creators are compensated. The PPL would encourage communities to contribute to a common pool of knowledge, code or creativity, knowing that any resulting profit would help sustain their own cooperative entities; profit would be subsumed to the social goal of sustaining the commons and the commoners.

By using the PPL, Bauwens argues, “peer production would be able to move from a proto-mode of production, unable to perpetuate itself on its own outside capitalism, to an autonomous and real mode of production. It would create a counter-economy that can be the basis for reconstituting a ‘counter-hegemony’ with a for-benefit circulation of value allied to pro-commons social movements. This could be the basis of the political and social transformation of the political economy.” Instead of our being locked into a “communism of capital” in which large companies can amass more capital by appropriating the fruits of sharing on open platforms, peer production mode could self-reproduce itself, socially and financially.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

David Bollier is an author, activist, blogger and scholar of the commons.  He is cofounder of Commons Strategies Group and author of Think Like a Commoner and co-editor of The Wealth of the Commons, among other books.

Photo by eekim

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Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.

This short text by Dmytri Kleiner was originally published in his mailing list back in 2011. It’s still as relevant now as it was back then.

Dmytri Kleiner: In the meantime, I’d like to reflect a little on Evgeny Morozov’s keynote at #28c3 this morning.

The topic was Surveillance Enabling Technologies. Long story short, Telecoms, Tech Firms, and Governments are developing and deploying systems to control and monitor their citizens online communications, and even selling this technology to governments that are widely considered to be authoritarian. It’s this last bit that I want to expand upon a little.

As Evgeny mentioned, as did others asking questions from the audience, this can not be understood as a few unscrupulous firms making sinister deals with foreign powers to profit from the suppression of dissidents and activists. For this most part these firms are not designing and building surveillance technologies at the behest of the likes of Iran and Syria, but as result driven by law enforcement in western states. And what’s more, they are required by laws passed by western states to build-in the very backdoors and interception features that surveillance systems depend on. It’s hard to blame the companies for building in features that the law requires them to build in.

Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.

Though certain firms are clearly beyond the pale in their eagerness to promote their freedom-denying technology. This overall view that these firms or some foreign powers are to blame was largely rejected by Morozov and by the commentators from the #28c3 audience. The blame for increased interception of communications and technological surveillance is best place at the feet of western governments, whose laws, law enforcement agencies and military-industrial corporate lobbies are the real movers and shakers pushing for more and more control and monitoring of civilian populations.

Promotors of such mass surveillance systems claim to be defending civilization itself, from the usual array of boogeymen, including terrorists, and child pornographers, but make no mistake, their real target is freedom itself.

These systems are part of the process of destroying peer-to-peer communications, to eliminate the mesh topologies from modern communication platforms and restructure them as star topologies, and the major reason for this is not to hunt deviants or insurgents, but rather to control the consumer, and protect Capitalist privilege and profits.

In The Telekommunist Manifesto, as well as other texts, I discuss that fact that Capitalism and Peer-to-peer systems are not compatible, that Capitalism depends on the ability of platform owners to control user data and interaction, in order to monetize it. Such control is a prerequisite of receiving financial capital from investors, who understand very well that there are no profits, or more accurately rents, to be had from free networks, and thus insist on control to ensure a return their investments.

The Internet, as it exists now, is an existential threat to capitalist regimes, not only does it allow individual users and groups to collectively share information that reveals the cosy relationship between governments and rent seeking corporate lobbies, more importantly it allows new forms of commerce that blur the distinction of producer and consumer, and allow users to produce and share in new ways, such fluidity of interactions puts downward pressure of profits as people share amongst themselves and “cut out the middleman,” as commerce becomes disintermediated.

This threat is of particular concern with regard to intellectual property, which can be digitized and sent across computer networks. This is bad news for western economies who more and more aim to make their profits by owning ideas and designs, while letting others actually make things. Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas.

Capitalism thus depends on the elimination of peer-to-peer systems by replacing, freedom-enabling mesh topologies, with freedom-denying star topologies. Recent communication history illustrates this quite clearly, with Venture Capital funding Web 2.0s capture of all communications, replacing earlier and far more scalable p2p applications, and the military-industrial fueled enclosure of cyberspace is just another part of this.

Evgeny Morozov suggests that we act and get the media and our political representatives to take notice and lead an outcry against this rapidly increasing lock-down of our online platforms, yet this requires that our media and our politicians will rally against capitalism, since it’s not just a few rogue firms or states driving this development, but rather the requirements of our class structure.

At the bottom of it, Capitalism, as a system based on hierarchy, privilege and exploitation, can not create a free network, anymore than it can create a free society. If there is a way out this, it’s unlikely to be governments and popular news organisations that help us. Our only chance is to develop new ways of producing and sharing, and find ways to build communication platforms that do not depend on capitalist finance.

If we do not find ways to replace capitalist finance it is not only the internet as we know it that we will lose, but the chance the remake society in its image.

Photo by carious.photography

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Dmytri Kleiner

So, to try to explain what “venture communism” is, which is my own project, predating the term “peer production”, but very relevant to it. I think we’re talking about the same thing, even if I was using different terms. As a technologist, I was also inspired by the functioning of peer networks and the organization of free software projects. These were also the inspiration for venture communism. I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods. The Internet gives us a very efficient platform on which we can share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

Henry George

Venture communism seeks to tackle the issue of how we can do the same thing with material wealth. I drew on lots of sources in the creation of this model, not exclusively anarchist-communist sources. One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth. Mutualizing unearned income is essentially what that means in layman’s terms. The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal.

Even within the cooperative movement, which I’ve always admired and held up as an example, it’s clear that the distribution of productive assets is also unequal. The same with other kinds of production; for example, if you look at the social power of IT workers versus agricultural workers, it becomes very clear that the social power of a collective of IT workers is much stronger than the social power of a collective agricultural workers. There is inequality in human and capital available for these cooperatives. This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration. The typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another, and that solution is either creating giant cooperatives like Mondragon, or socialist states.

Silvio Gessel

But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class, which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class. So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class? This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.

The idea is that the cooperatives are still very much independent just as cooperatives are now. The producers are independent, but instead of owning their productive assets themselves, each member of the cooperative owns these together with each member of every other cooperative in the Federation, and the cooperatives rent the property from the commune collectively. This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol. The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.

So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed among all the cooperatives and all the stakeholders among those cooperatives, and that’s the basic protocol of venture communism.

Whatever productive assets you consume, you pay rent for, and that rent is divided equally among all members of the commune. Not the individual cooperatives, but the commune itself. This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal. So if you are a regular person, then you are kind of moving evenly, right? But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income. And conversely, if you’re a super motivated producer, and you’re greatly expanding your productive capacity, then what you pay for productive assets will be much higher than what you get in dividend, presumably, because you’re also earning income from the application of that property to production. So, venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives. The product of the cooperatives is fully theirs to dispose of as they like. It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets.

Photo by T a k

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Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens: I’d like to start with outlining the issue, the problem around the emergence of peer production within the current neoliberal capitalist form of society and economy that we have. We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right?

The situation is that we have created communities consisting of people who are sometimes paid, sometimes volunteers, and by using open licenses, we are actually creating commonses – think about Linux, Wikipedia, Arduino, those kinds of things. But what is the problem? The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital. So, there is an accumulation of the commons on the one side, we are effectively producing a commons, but we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction. We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere. The solution that I propose is related to the work of Dmytri Kleiner – Dmytri proposed some years ago to create a peer production license. I’ll give you my interpretation of it; you can only use our commons if you reciprocate to some degree. So, instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons. Imagine that you have a community of producers, and around that you have an entrepreneurial coalition of cooperative, ethical, social, solidarity enterprise.

The idea is that you would have an immaterial commons of codes and knowledge, but then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops. The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production. That’s the basic idea. I think that a number of things are happening around that, like solidarity co-ops, and other new forms of cooperative-ism.

The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups. They have been very influenced by this neoliberal atmosphere that has been dominant in their generation. They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take. Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money. They forbid you to continue to work in the same sector after your company has failed, and you have a gag order, so you don’t even have free speech to talk about your negative experience. This is a very common experience. Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system.

There is a real lack of knowledge within the young generation that there are other forms of enterprise possible. I think that the other way is also true. A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge. They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge. They’re also not aware that there’s a new way of becoming more competitive through increased cooperation of open knowledge commons. This is the human side of it, and we need to work on the knowledge and mutual experience of these two sectors. Both are growing at the same time; after the crisis of 2008, we’ve had an explosion of the sharing economy and the peer production economy on the one side, but also a revitalization of the cooperative sector.

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This is derived from original proposals by the Telekommunisten group, where entities capable of doing transvestment are called ‘Venture Communes’.

The following short text and audio lecture explain the background to this idea and practice.

Ian Wright: Dmytri Kleiner‘s “venture communism” is a recent proposal for getting from here to there. You can download Dmytri’s manifesto here.

A key idea is a new kind of institution — the “venture commune” — an association of co-operatives that is the sole owner of all the assets of all constituent worker-owned firms.

All land, buildings, capital etc. are rented by the co-ops from the venture commune. All members of co-ops are automatically members of the commune. Hence, the means of production are communally owned.

In theory this institution solves the problem of the highly unequal distribution of capital between worker-owned firms in a market economy.

In addition, the venture commune democratically allocates funds to new worker-owned start-ups. The idea here is that the institutions of the venture commune will compete with the institutions of venture capitalism, and eventually crowd-out the latter.

I gave a half-hour talk on Dymtri’s ideas in Oxford, UK, which provides more details. You can listen to the audio here:

In that talk I refer to the input/output relations of the venture commune with the surrounding capitalist sector. This diagram summarises the main monetary flows:

Venture communism is precisely the kind of institutional proposal that satisfies the requirement of a political economy of socialism that is immediately a new kind of political practice. For me, it is an highly instructive reference and starting point.

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Telekommunisten have created a Facebook game to promote #votelabour

Put On Your Corbyn Face might be the first ever Facebook game that you play with empathy and feeling. Your score depends on how well you can reproduces the emotion in a picture of Jeremy Corbyn!

https://gamesforthemany.com/corbynface/

Telekommunisten promote Venture Communism. Venture Communism is rooted in a network of co-operatives. The key idea is to replace the institutions of the bourgeois state. Instead, we intend to build the new society within the shell of the old. One that is commons-based, bottom-up, and worker-controlled.

In the mean time, millions depend on the bourgeois state. Heath care, housing, education and many other social goods depend on the state. While we are building the P2P future, we depend on the present institutions. Without them, communities face more precarity, and have less capacity to build alternatives.

For this reason, when the opportunity presents itself to make things better, we need to act.

We don’t expect the bourgeois state to build the commons for us. We act when direct political participation can make a difference.

The Jeremy Corbyn campaign is such an opportunity.

Like all who would restrict the ability of the wealthy few to expand their wealth. Like all who would not make the few richer at the expense of the many. Corbyn has faced merciless resistance from the establishment. He has has faced an especially biased press.

We know that centralized capitalist social media is oppressive and profit focused. Despite this, it is one way where individuals can help. By sharing, people can support Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party against Theresa May’s Tories. May and the Tories support banning cryptography, which P2P software depends on. They support the privatization of the NHS. They support austerity, war, and environmental catastrophe.

A Facebook game was a way for us to make a positive contribution.

Put On Your Corbyn Face uses your webcam. The classification system uses an open source JavaScript library called clmtracker. The library compares 60 points on your face to a photo of Jeremy Corbyn. The better you are able to emulate the emotion in Jeremy’s face, the higher your score.

After you play, you have the option to share your score on Facebook, or download it, and share elsewhere.

Use this special link to play and share the slogan “When you hear that banning cryptography will make the UK safer”

https://gamesforthemany.com/corbynface/#18

Each time somebody shares their score on Facebook, they reach hundreds of people.

In Solidarity,
Baruch Gottlieb, Dmytri Kleiner

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