Austin – P2P Foundation

How nonprofits are organizing tech workers for social change

Shareable — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 07:19:43 +0000

Cross-posted from Shareable.

Nithin Coca: As tensions between tech companies and their surrounding communities in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin continue to escalate, there’s an effort underway to find meaningful, collaborative solutions. From driving up the costs of housing to increasing traffic congestion, employees of large-scale tech corporations have been blamed for intensifying socio-economic inequalities. But some workers are taking matters into their own hands. Recently, Google dropped its Project Maven collaboration with the Pentagon after employee pressure.

Coworker.org, a nonprofit based in the U.S. that enables workers to start campaigns to change their workplaces, received more inquiries from employees at tech firms about using the platform following the election in 2016. Yana Calou, the group’s engagement and training manager said: “They were really concerned about their jobs being used towards things that they were not really comfortable with.”

Another organization leading this effort in the San Francisco Bay Area, home to several of the world’s largest technology companies, is the TechEquity Collaborative, which is taking more of a grassroots approach.

“No one was looking at the rank and file tech worker as a constituent group to be organized in a political way,” says Catherine Bracy, executive director of the TechEquity Collaborative. “There is a critical mass of tech workers who feel a huge sense of shame and guilt about the role that the industry is playing in creating these inequitable conditions, and want to do something different about it. They are hungry for opportunities to learn and be out there and contributing to solutions.”

TechEquity’s model — as its names states — is a collaborative one. Instead of dictating solutions, the organization works on connecting tech workers with affected communities to foster a shared approach to reaching potential solutions.

“It’s not just a political strategy, it’s an end in of itself,” Bracy says. “We need to develop stronger relationships based on trust if we’re going to live in a world where tech can be a value-add for everybody, not just the people who are getting rich from it.”

This connects with the challenges facing another key group — gig workers. Many gig workers have seen their livelihoods directly impacted by the growth of platforms like Uber, Taskrabbit, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. Coworker.org is also helping gig and contract workers organize campaigns. One of those campaigns, started by the App-Based Drivers Association, a group for drivers working for various app-based companies, targeted Uber, which refused to make in-app tipping available to all of its drivers based in the U.S. Organizers believe this campaign played a role in the ride-hailing giant adding tipping in June 2017.

Coworker.org’s platform allows for a similar function — workers can build networks within the platform to stay connected after the completion of a campaign. For gig workers who work in isolation, this can be a powerful organizing tool. There are currently approximately 6,300 Uber drivers on Coworker.org. Calou sees potential for these networks to increase the power of gig or contract workers who are often at the periphery of the tech industry.

“One of things that we’re doing is thinking about is how can workers at these companies join employee networks where anyone has ever signed a petition on Uber then has a platform where they can connect with each other and have a more sustained, long-term view of things they want to get together and work on,” says Calou.

For Bracy, building worker power within the industry and partnerships with communities everywhere are key steps towards restoring the promise of the internet and digital technology to connect people.

“I still think the internet is the most powerful for democratizing communication in human history, and we’ve seen a lot of bad, but there is a lot of potential for good, but we have to do the work to pull the industry in that direction to make sure that promise of the internet is kept,” Bracy says.

Header image by Raquel Torres, courtesy of TechEquity Collaborative

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New Ridesharing Alternatives Thrive After Uber Leaves Austin

Shareable — Sat, 10 Sep 2016 10:30:00 +0000

Maira Sutton: There are numerous reasons to be critical of the corporate “sharing economy,” which claims to democratize work and enable people to share assets. Companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Taskrabbit facilitate peer-to-peer access to various services for customers, and promise an easy income for their contract workers. But along with the convenience come some hazards for those involved.

On the customers’ side, there have been major disputes around the safety of these services, which have come to light following stories about unsafe Airbnb properties and reports of large numbers of drivers assaulting riders. In response, many cities have started to regulate these services.

Last month, residents of Austin, Texas, voted to affirm city rules that regulate ridesharing services like taxis, NPR reported. What this means, among other things, is that these companies would need to do background checks and fingerprints on potential drivers. Uber and Lyft had sunk $8 million into their public campaign to defeat the law, and boycotted the city in protest by immediately halting operations. Many users were dismayed to find their go-to mode of transport evaporate overnight. Meanwhile, countless drivers suffered when their new source of regular income was abruptly shut off.

But their anguish may have only been temporary. In the absence of Uber and Lyft, alternative ridesharing services have sprung up in their place, The Atlantic reports. It had been difficult for new players to challenge the duopoly, given their advantage of having many drivers and customers already use their service. However, the two companies’ disappearance created an opening for other enterprises to emerge. In the month since the election, several smaller rideshare startups have attempted to fill the void.

One of them is even challenging the very premise of having corporate middlemen coordinate the rides. Arcade City started as a Facebook group — which is still going strong with over 32,000 members — where drivers self-organize into teams to refer and coordinate passengers. The founders of the group plan to release their mobile app this summer — first to be launched in Austin in July, followed by a global version in August. The service will rely on blockchain technology and is designed to be completely decentralized, so that there would be no organization overseeing the coordination of drivers with riders.

RiseAustin is yet another alternative. It’s centralized like Uber, but rather than being a corporation, it’s a non-profit. RideAustin’s organizers hope that their their nonprofit status will enable them to provide the best terms for both drivers and riders, without the pressures of having to turn a maximum profit for shareholders.

In the midst of these new alternatives, the city itself has been taking proactive steps to boost driver-owned taxi services. Even before the vote on the regulation, the Austin Transportation Department invited people to submit applications to start a co-op taxi franchise, as per a report on KXAN. In May, Curbed Austin reported that the Austin City Council voted unanimously to approve one of them, giving a franchise agreement with ATX Coop Taxi. The city even lifted the existing cap on the number of permits the cooperative could have for their drivers from 150 to more than 500.

Some argue that these new regulations were designed to stifle emerging ridesharing services. The fact that these alternatives have cropped up despite the regulations undermines these claims.

Austin demonstrates how the sudden loss of an unregulated would-be monopoly (or an Uber, Lyft duopoly in this case) can create an opportunity for people to re-imagine how these services can be better designed and governed to serve the public. It’s also a case study in how cities can encourage city-scale enterprises to be democratically-owned and operated by locals for locals, ensuring that the public interest comes before shareholders’ interests.

Photo credit: rutlo via Remodel Blog / CC BY

Cross-posted from Shareable.

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Austin Inadvertently Promotes Open-Source Ride-Sharing

Kevin Carson — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 09:30:00 +0000

Austin voters, in a referendum last month, rejected a measure to overturn local regulations of so-called “ride-sharing” services. Although the main backing for the regulations was the legacy taxicab monopolies (which resented having to compete with even proprietary monopolies like Uber and Lyft), the result of leaving them in place has been to promote the emergence of a business model that undermines both the medallion taxi monopoly and proprietary “ride-sharing” monopolies. Jerome Tuccille describes this unanticipated outcome in an article at Reason (“After Winning Regulatory Battle Against Ride-Sharing Firms, Austin Turns to Black Market and Deregulation,” May 31).

The phony corporate “sharing economy” is not a sharing economy at all, but a walled garden economy in which corporations use proprietary apps to interpose themselves between drivers and riders, hosts and guests, etc., and extract a surplus for allowing them to connect with each other. A lot of people in the peer-to-peer and cooperative movements have argued that the proper response to companies like Uber and Lyft is not to restore the medallion cab monopolies and the local regulatory cartels they depend on, but to take competition one step further and destroy the legal monopolies the business model of the corporate “ride-sharing” services depends on.

The idea is to undermine the monopolies of companies like Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and the like with a genuinely cooperative, horizontal and P2P model directly controlled by the users themselves, and cut out the corporate middleman altogether. Advocates for this model have coined the term “Platform Cooperativism” for it (if you search the #PlatformCooperativism hashtag on Twitter, you’ll find links to a lot of great articles on it).

You can even take it a step further and attack Uber, Lyft and their ilk from within by jailbreaking their apps or subverting their workforces. From what I hear it’s fairly common for Uber and Lyft drivers, fed up with the exploitative nature of their relationship to the company, to quietly pass their personal business card along to trusted customers and make future private arrangements that cut the company out of the deal. Of course that no doubt violates all kinds of “non-competition clauses,” but as far as I’m concerned Uber and Lyft can put that on their TS list.

And that’s exactly the kind of thing a lot of Austin drivers and riders are doing, now that Uber and Lyft have withdrawn from the local market. According to Tuccille,

“in the wake of a ‘victory’ for pro-regulation forces, there’s been a big surge in completely unregulated rides arranged by word of mouth, through closed social media groups, and through peer-to-peer services. On Facebook, Austin Underground Ride (currently around 6,500 members) urges former Uber and Lyft drivers to join. ‘You can post your availability and info on this page and continue making the money you need to feed your families and pay your bills. Riders can post here their needs for a ride as well. We don’t need anyone. We can make our own deals as people and take care of ourselves.’”

Open-source apps like Arcade City are also making increased headway in Austin since the referendum. In other words, actual ride-sharing — the kind of genuine P2P model that should have supplanted the medallion cabs in the first place — is the biggest growth industry in Austin. And the city government and local voters, deliberately and inadvertently (respectively) doing the bidding of the medallion cab companies, are responsible for bringing it about. By outlawing the fake, hybridized form of “ride-sharing,” they opened up an ecological niche for the real thing.

Government attempts to regulate industry are almost always motivated by the interests of the regulated industry itself. But with governments and corporations being the stupid things that they are, sometimes their plans backfire.

Photo by Storeyland

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