At the Sustainable Economies Law Center, we support creativity and innovation in many ways, one of which is to uplift homemade food enterprises. So, it wasn’t easy to come to our decision to not support AB 626. AB 626 is a bill that was drafted at the behest of tech company executives and lobbyists to prioritize their interests above the interests of home cooks and consumers. After being stalled for several months, the bill passed a vote of the full Assembly in January and will soon be up for a vote in the Senate Health Committee.

The media has been reporting a lot lately on “the dark side of the tech revolution” (KQED) as you may have noticed. The New York Times Magazine described typical strategy among tech start-ups as striving to “metastasize from transaction enablers to, with sufficient success, participation gatekeepers.” An example of this is food-delivery apps like Seamless which tout convenient ways for customers to get food delivered from local restaurants, but in some cities the app has become so pervasive that “its customer base becomes too big to ignore, even for restaurants that struggle to afford its steep commissions” so a consumer-friendly app becomes just another means for consolidated corporate control of the food system.

We recognize that the fundamental paradigm of Big Tech is a problem: this paradigm which revolves around extremely rapid growth, monopolization, exploitation of workers and user data, disregard for important public safety and worker protection laws, and inhumane and unsustainable profit maximization.

So what’s the solution?

Our friends and allies have repeatedly called for a new revolution in tech that would make tech platforms democratically owned and controlled by users, proposing to make Facebook a regulated utility or a platform cooperative and proposals to buy Twitter to make it a cooperative. People have wondered: what if Uber were owned by the Uber drivers? Spoiler alert: venture capitalists, business executives, and absentee shareholders who own and control these tech giants tend to disapprove of such proposals so while they are exciting visionary ideas that stimulate important conversations, they are not likely to be realized in the near future.

But while an established tech giant becoming a user-owned cooperative seems far fetched, we’ve been engaged in another opportunity to change the paradigm of Big Tech and support the creation of more community-owned tech platforms. That brings us back to AB 626, the California bill that proposes to dramatically change the regulation of homemade food sales to be much more permissive; a bill that would represent a major shift in food safety regulations and likely set new precedent around the country.

The bill is backed by tech companies, including Airbnb and executives of the soon-to-be retired tech start-up Josephine, among other venture capital backed tech companies. There are numerous reasons to support the general concept of the bill: legalizing an industry that’s already active, creating more opportunities for small business ownership, supporting local food systems, and more. One reason we’ve historically supported legalizing homemade food enterprises is that this provides opportunities to challenge concentrated corporate control of the food system.

However, tech company executives and lobbyists have been making the decisions on the direction of this bill. The bill has been amended several times and more amendments could be on the way, but each version of the bill has failed to place serious responsibilities on the tech companies involved in transacting sales of homemade food and each version has failed to ensure adequate worker protections. We fear the imminent Uberization of homemade food if nothing is done to change course.

We have proposed a policy that would allow more sales of fresh homemade foods made in home kitchens with reasonable food safety requirements (such as safe food handling training, kitchen inspections, sanitary standards) and with the important condition that only certain types of legal entities could operate a web application or web platform that promotes sales of homemade food and takes a cut of each transaction. This is very similar to how California law has restricted certified farmers’ markets for decades: only certified farmers, nonprofits, and local governments may manage farmers’ markets (for-profit non-farm enterprises such as Walmart and Whole Foods cannot operate a farmers’ market) which helps protect the integrity of the farmers’ market as supporting farmers by providing a venue for direct producer to consumer sales of fresh agricultural products.

This is an opportunity to change the paradigm of tech: if this alternative vision were incorporated into California’s next expansion of homemade food legislation it could set a huge precedent in tech across sectors and around the globe.

We need your help! Forms of support needed range from simple letter writing to more active participation in a working group, community outreach, and more.

Read our much more detailed policy paper here.

Read more about the evolving political landscape of homemade food in California here.

Photo by siwiaszczyk

The post Supporting new cooperative tech paradigms to protect the homemade food economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Trebor Scholz: It’s exhilarating to be here on the Canary Islands seeing this large group of people committing itself to building a more equitable future of work. I’m also thrilled to see so many young people and especially women. Today, I am bringing you greetings from the platform cooperativism movement. This event follows others in New York, Brussels, Boulder, Milan, Paris, to Toronto, London, and many other cities.(See videos and images of our last conference, The People’ Disruption, at The New School just two weeks ago).

The platform cooperativism movement intervenes at a moment of social crisis in the United States when ninety-four percent of jobs created over the past decade were not in the employment category. In 2016, over twelve million workers have made money on labor platforms. Much of that work is invisible with laborers often exploited, tucked away between algorithms. And over the long-term, as more labor markets shift to the Internet, it also matters that ownership of cloud services and social hangouts on the Internet is highly concentrated.

With two recent books, media campaigns like the #BuyTwitter inspired by Nathan Schneider, and the digital labor conferences that I convened since 2009 at The New School, we affected countless people. There have been innumerable newspaper articles and talks. Platform co-ops were launched, and there are now small platform cooperativism working groups in Berlin, Tokyo, and Melbourne. (Why not watch the two showcase sessions at The People’s Disruption: I and II?)

We must succeed in this endeavor because the workers need us to succeed. “We need us to succeed,” as Palak Shah put it at The People’s Disruption.

Over the next forty minutes, I would like first to give you a bit of context about the roots of platform cooperativism, introduce an example of platform co-ops, and lastly offer some reflections to contribute to your work, locally.

I.

While this is not only a story about the Internet, it starts in 1969 when the first four nodes of the Net were linked up. After three decades of relative income equality after WWII (especially when you were white), in 1972 wages of Americans workers started to stagnate if adjusted for inflation. In 1989, the Socialist republics imploded and many trade unions started to decline. At this point, capitalism lost its most fervent internal and external challengers. The World Wide Web had become a household name by 1995, but it really only caught on as a technology that was used for Internet-mediated labor in 2005. It was then that Amazon introduced its crowdsourcing platform, getting, as filmmaker Alex Rivera put it in his cult hit Sleep Dealer, “all the work without the worker.”

On the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, the sharing economy capitalized on the willingness of people to work for less and give up their rights associated with employment, as guaranteed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Initially, however, a genuine sharing economy emerged, concerned with resource sharing and ecological devastation (think: Couchsurfing and Blablacar) but this was swiftly hijacked by the extractive logic of venture capital that forced such companies to turn on their turbo vacuum cleaners and extract value from communities. These platforms were like four-dimensional objects arriving in three-dimensional space. They swooshed past regulators like ghosts, and when these policymakers started to pay attention, the companies were already in their third product-cycle. Democracy is slow, but technologists on the ground move with warp speed. Extractive sharing economy startups mobilized the language of peer-to-peer discourses and intimacy. They appropriated the ideology of counterculture of the Sixties and instrumentalized the social capital of cooperatives to sell services through platforms.

Over the past forty years, as the French political scientist Thomas Piketty substantiated, income inequality has spiked. “Super managers” emerged with astronomical salaries while the bottom ninety percent had fewer and fewer life opportunities. Since 1972, the wages of American workers stagnated while their productivity, individually, steadily increased. Today, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet own more wealth than the poorest half of the United States combined.

Such extreme economic shifts also lead people to identify differently. They are looking for a way out. Some people turn to drugs (just consider the opioid epidemic in the U.S.), to activism or tech, or to building economic alternatives. Parts of the population turned to nationalism; they are radicalizing, becoming a threat to the project of democracy altogether. Cultural schisms became more pronounced as we’ve seen with Brexit where most Britons living outside urban centers and Scotland who opted to leave the European Union.

Income inequality was also a contributing factor when it comes to the rise of xenophobia and nationalism all across Europe and the United States. Just think of the thirteen percent of German voters who made the neo-fascist AFD the third strongest party in Germany.

Building on these problems, the technologies underlying the on-demand economy accelerate the emergence of a neo-feudalism, virtually a new servant culture that puts the bottom ninety percent into the service of the top ten percent.

Facing a social crisis like this, I support anything that makes the situation better for most people. As long as it serves that purpose, align yourself with whichever movement you want or follow whatever strategy or tactic: work with regulators, build alternatives, work with unions. Naturally, we see a broad alliance with cooperatives worldwide, the solidarity economy movement, the pro-commons movement, unions, and labor advocacy groups, policymakers, the employee ownership movement, the Open Source/Free Software movement, and the Creative Commons.

II.

“To outline a different model of consumption, is of a much more real and revolutionary significance than all the abstract speeches about the billions pocketed by monopolies and about the need to nationalize them.” (Gorz, 82)

In an article, written in 2014, I suggested to join the almost two-hundred-year-old economic model of cooperatives with the digital economy. Imagine an Uber owned by its drivers. I called this intellectual framework “platform cooperativism.” (Try to say that three times fast.) I think of it as the intellectual Northstar for an ethical on-demand economy, characterized by two core commitments:

1) The platform is owned by the workers or the workers alongside other people who have a stake in this platform. These might be users or consumers. This is about coming into economic power; it is about the move from the blueprints to actual economic power. You cannot substantially change what you do not own.

2) The platform is democratically governed which means that the people who depend on it most, have a say in what happens on it.Importantly, the idea is not to create a clone of the likes of Airbnb or Uber. It isn’t about creating replicas. But we do rip the algorithmic heart out of these platforms only to put in a different code based on our values: cooperative values.

Platform cooperatives are different in that they embed the seven cooperative principles in the design of platforms. I’ll explain this further when talking about UpandGo.coop. The organizational form of the cooperative is key for platforms if they want to support economic, digital self-defense and autonomy. It allows communities to make a living while also contributing to the greater good. The economic model of platform cooperativism has distinct advantages if compared to investor-based startups.

The importance of inclusive codesign has been one of the central insights for us. Codesign is the opposite of masculine Silicon Valley “waterfall model of software design,” which means that you build a platform and then reach out to potential users. We follow a more feminine approach to building platforms where the people who are meant to populate the platform are part of building it from the very first day. We also design for outliers: disabled people and other people on the margins who don’t fit into the cookie-cutter notions of software design of Silicon Valley.

Let’s talk about Up&Go

Take Up&Go.coop, for example, is an umbrella platform for various cooperatives, designed in New York. Up & Go connects users with professional house cleaning services provided by low-income immigrant women who are organized in local cooperatives. The platform is cooperatively owned and governed by the women who use it. As owners, they decide how they want to provide their services to clients. The low-income immigrant women who are working on Up & Go, are receiving ninety-five percent of the revenue of the platform. For now, Up & Go is able to dedicate no more than five percent of its revenues to operate the platform. What’s important to me about platform co-ops is that they are activating the negative spaces of Trumpism. They are a response to the market failures of the extractive sharing economy. To raise our ambitions, I invite cooperators to think about platform cooperativism as what 1970s French theorist André Gorz called “non-reformist reform.” It acknowledges that “all struggle for reform is not necessarily reformist.” (7) Gorz writes,”A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. It basis the possibility of attaining this objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes.” (7-8)

Platform cooperatives are projects of transition on the way to a post-capitalist future. They are economic near-term alternatives that can provide the material sustenance that allows workers to build out these platforms as scaffolding on which to build a better future. In Strategy for Labor, Gorz writes

“Instead of dichotomizing the future and the present — future power and present impotence, like Good and Evil — what must be done is to bring the future into the present, to make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength, their ability to measure themselves against the power of capital and to impose their will on it.” (11)

Up & Go demonstrates that positive strength of workers through design interventions, too. They differ in many ways. Up & Go refuses an individual reputation system for its workers, for example. In Silicon Valley, we are so used to the narrative of innovation that we often forget that the technological developments that we are describing as innovative are more focused on short-term profits for shareholders instead of sustaining businesses or community value for that matter. We need to build lasting generational wealth that impacts our communities.What was especially interesting talking to the developers and people involved in Up & Go is that the key challenge in the development was more social than not technical. It was about getting the various cooperatives to agree to work with this platform and to accept credit cards. It was important to look beyond day-to-day disagreements; this is about our project, and we will succeed together. Platform cooperativism is not only a political and economical intervention, but it is also a cultural project. This is not only about the fight for new organizational structures but it has to go to the root level. It’s about changing people’s mindsets.

Silicon Valley has its own culture. Platform cooperativism needs its own culture concerned with the necessary shift from the idea of the competitive super worker, the homo economicus who mows down the competition. Instead, this is about an image of us as cooperators who sometimes act out of self-interest but then, too, driven mutual aid and cooperation. A large part of our work is about the shaping of a counter-narrative. Currently, Up & Go’s workforce is small in numbers: just a few dozen women from three cooperatives, but I still think this example can tell us a lot about the potential of worker cooperatives in the platform economy. Worker cooperatives in the United States are few and far between. There are just four hundred of them in the U.S., and they haven’t created very many jobs. Governance and scaling are key challenges. People just can’t agree with one another. While worker cooperatives, in particular, seem to have hit a glass ceiling in the economy, they may be able to grow and have access to nontraditional sources of funding – crowdsourcing, ICOs, and other blockchain experiments. These were not available to traditional worker cooperatives previously, as labor scholar Juliet Schor pointed out at The People’s Disruption. Worker cooperatives have the potential to scale in the platform economy.

Up & Go can also launch us into a discussion about the economic impact of platform co-ops. People who are more inclined to support big capital than I am — like economist Tyler Cowen— dismiss cooperatives because their contribution to the GDP is too small. That’s a fair point. Economically at least, in the United States cooperatives are only a small part of the GDP. Despite the fact that one in three Americans is part of a cooperative, there are impactful cooperatives like ACE Hardware, REI COOP, Ocean Spray, Evergreen Coops, Cabot Cheese, and of course the Associated Press (AP), and internationally, Barcelona Soccer Club, closely followed by Mondragon in the Basque country. (Watch the talk by Jim Kennedy, senior vice president for strategy and corporate development at the AP, at The People’s Disruption).

But in day-to-day life, for most Americans, these cooperatives are hidden in plain sight. In part, the problem may be that these institutions do not project their values outward, or that the co-op is not always consequential when it comes to labor conditions (think: REI COOP is a consumer cooperative but its 12,000 employees are not members). If you study business, with very few exceptions, you will not learn about cooperatives in business schools in the United States. But Cowen is falling prey to what author Chip Ward calls the “tyranny of the quantifiable” (what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot). Platform cooperatives and of course traditional cooperatives create benefits in many unmeasured ways, and it is exactly this peer value, the long-term value that is created for the community, the value that is created among refugees and immigrant populations and their families and relatives that needs to be accounted for, too.

The creeping spread of cyber-empire

The “frightful five” capture more than half of all Internet traffic. This extreme platform power of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon irreparably tips over power asymmetries between users and platform owners, especially when we consider how their power will be amplified through the stack— the interlinkages between existing web services, AI, the Internet of Things, and smart cities, mobile apps, and cloud services. As the F.C.C. plans to repeal net neutrality, it is urgent to work on alternatives such as the cooperative cloud. MiData.coop, a Swiss platform co-op has plans to federate cooperative cloud storage to facilitate the sharing of health data between patients.

What does all of this mean for your practice?

I flew in here just a few hours ago from New York City. I will not pretend that I know anything about the Canary Islands, this territory off the shore of the Sahara. I do know, however, about Made in Canarias the project of Pablo’s team and the Glocal Network of Platform Cooperatives. There are significant agricultural and housing cooperatives and associations that intend to turn into co-ops. With 28.3%, unemployment here is even higher than on mainland Spain; 34% of women cannot find work. Only ten percent of your food supply is produced locally. Despite the fact that I just helicoptered in on the islands, I have three suggestions. “If you build it with them, they will stay.” As the saying goes, “If you will build it, they will come” but “If you build it with them, they will stay.” We should start by designing these platforms with all stakeholders involved starting on day one (e.g., designers, workers, prospective users, funders, policymakers). The person closest to the problem is the person most qualified to solve it.

Co-design

Inclusive co-design counters the masculine waterfall model of software design. It is agile and builds on small successes. Technology is a social process. There’s been so much excitement about blockchain technology and artificial intelligence and the opportunities of all of that. There is something extremely important about blockchain technologies. But looking at what blockchain can do right now, this still seems unclear. I don’t need to be a card-carrying blockchain believer to see that. And as I had shown with Up & Go, the social aspects matter at least as much as the technical in the platform co-op design process. “Production is a means and man is the end,” as André Gorz put it (18). Historically, this became also evident with the introduction of TCP/IP, the Internet protocol. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the inventors of TCP/IP, had to go from institution to institution, from door-to-door, to convince people to use their protocol. Technology is a social process.

Creating ecosystems of mutual benefit

Next, think about the creation of ecosystems of mutual benefit. How can a food cooperative help local housing cooperatives? How can a union support the agricultural co-op and how a taxi co-op can create profits for an association of service workers? Have a look at Howard Brodsky’s project “Cooperatives for a Better World.” Beyond that, I would also highly recommend you to learn about SMart, which is a mutual risk cooperative now operating in nine European countries creating benefits for freelancers.

Contribute to the commons

My next advice is to wholeheartedly invest in the commons. With platform cooperatives you see those investments in the commons widely. Many platform co-ops share their code base on Github.

Focus on pull markets

Start in markets where no extensive marketing is necessary because clearly, it will be very difficult to compete with the war chest of the likes of Uber or Airbnb. Starting in markets where there is more demand than supply such as social healthcare and home health care will be of strategic importance. Millions of home healthcare workers worldwide will be needed over the next few decades, worldwide. Labor markets such as child care, home health care, food delivery, house cleaning, and data entry are shifting to the Internet where workers toil under conditions they do not choose for CEOs they cannot ouster. This is an area where the Platform Cooperativism Consortium in New York will focus most of its efforts going forward.

We need scholars and builders of platforms and culture

We need builders. We need pragmatic utopians. But we also need universities. I’m not suggesting that researchers will be able to determine which platform co-op models will succeed in a given country (I wish it’d be that easy). Scholars can, however, dig deep and trace the intellectual lineage of platform cooperativism. André Gorz is a good start. Second, it’s about ethnography and fieldwork. Third, it’s about organizational theory (i.e., analyzing governance issues). Practical case studies will be needed (what worked, what did not).

But none of that is enough.

We need to focus on sustaining the feeling of a shared project, holding on to our core commitments, while also allowing for diverse perspectives and different takes on what you can do with the platform co-op model— how i should be designed and how it can be used. As Jutta Trevanius said at People’s Disruption, “if you can keep [platform cooperativism] in that state of the impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, then that continually invites more people to help.”

We want participation. We want codesign. We want diverse practices.

The post Participation, codesign, diversity: Trebor Scholz on Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Our panelists included:

• Michel Bauwens, lead theoretician of the P2P Foundation
• Terry Bouricius, political scientist and expert on voting processes and sortition
• Susan Basterfield, management consultant and expert in self-organizing methods

The discussion centered on the importance of collaborative decision-making of tech platforms: What are the unique challenges — and potential solutions — when it comes to governance for platform co-ops, especially when their users are massive and remote? What are the foundations, pre-conditions, and key elements that enable collaborative deliberation? What are some real-world examples of how this can play out? Here are six ideas that emerged from the dialogue:

1. Learning and Building Upon Existing Models

Basterfield said it’s critical to listen to diverse perspectives and learn how to re-orient organizational power structures from the inside out. She said it’s important to find and shine a light on organizations and movements that are already reimaging how power can be distributed.

2. Dividing Decision-Making Responsibilities

The panelists agreed to some degree that there needs to be some divisions when it comes to decision-making. In simple terms, there are operational activities and deliberative activities. Passive users of a platform may not need to be in the know about operational activities. They may be more interested in the broader deliberations about the overall direction of the service.

The group agreed that there could be governance modules or teams to break up the huge mass of users into specializations over certain topics such as finance, branding, and policy decisions.

3. Bootstrapping the Organization

Bouricius said a key issue for democratic organizations is the the bootstrapping phase — how to get things up and running. There must be an initial plan to get it off the ground and to establish a process to ensure it continues in a democratic way. This can be done by having something like a rules committee that includes experts in facilitation or democratic procedures to draft the initial list of procedural features.

4. Sortition Model

Drawing from his decades of experience in public office and at a large consumer food co-op in Burlington, Vermont, Bouricius advocated for a jury model — or sortition — with random sample selections of average members to choose an organization’s board of directors and make major policy decisions.

During the bootstrapping phase, an organization that uses a sortition model must establish its initial rules about how the jury is drawn from the overall community to make sure it is as open, fair, and representative as possible. Once that is initially established, there must be a way to review the process itself to make sure it continues to function democratically, Bouricius said. Through this process, which would be iterated periodically, the jury system could be used to create a nominating committee to select boards of directors or a review committee that would oversee the board.

5. Social Charter

Bauwens described the need for a kind of social charter — much like the Constitution in the U.S. — that would establish the rules of engagement and values of the community. Basterfield said there must be an agreement on expectations — not just about participation and operations of the service — but how people on the platform choose to relate to each other. She noted that this is completely absent from most traditional, extractive shareholder-focused organizations.

6. User Ownership Would Lead to a New Twitter

Bauwens pointed out that if users owned Twitter, they would establish a new vision for the platform. Instead of being closed and controlled by management from above, it would be a more open platform where many can contribute — similar to an open-source project. That means endless potential for creating features that users would like to see on the platform. It also means the creation of a new social contract — one that could be built into Twitter’s Terms of Service that calls for the co-op to seriously address the tensions between free expression and sexual and racial harassment on the platform.

Since Twitter is so large and well established, Bauwens said a user-ownership conversion at this phase would be like taking over a plane in mid-flight. The question is, how would we make sure the plane doesn’t crash during this transition from being a shareholder-owned, top-down organization to one that is user-owned and governed from the bottom up? At the very least, there needs to be a core team of developers and operational people who understand how it works and continue to make it run.

If the proposal passes next month, that still doesn’t ensure that Twitter will become a user-owned cooperative. But even if it doesn’t, this process is raising interesting questions and sparking dialogue about how technology companies could turn into platform co-ops. We’ll keep you posted on how things progress for the #BuyTwitter movement — stay tuned.

Watch the full discussion here:

Graphic by Maira Sutton/Shareable

Photo by shivalichopra

The post 6 Ideas on How Millions of Users Can Own and Govern Twitter appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Dear Birdies,

The tweet-powered t-shirt vending machine in the room at Twitter’s shareholder meeting didn’t work at first. A Twitter employee attending to the machine walked me through the three hashtags required to get the shirt, but the machine wasn’t recognizing my tweeting. So, after 10 minutes of small talk with the employee about our proposal, I told her “Thank you” and started to go. But then the employee opened the vending machine door and handed me a shirt. Such a simple fix!

At Monday’s annual meeting, Twitter shareholders did not approve our proposal.

But by winning 4% of the vote, we can – and very likely will – resubmit a better proposal next year to democratize Twitter.

Twitter’s opposition statement to our proposal said it couldn’t be done. The truth is, even some of the strongest allies of #BuyTwitter assumed it was too complex. We’ve been through eight months of organizing, from op-ed to petition to proposal, defense, andMonday’s vote tally. Looking back, it all seems simple, like unlocking a vending machine.

Now, after the meeting, everything seems possible for our group.

A stock market analyst who helped guide our efforts emailed me, saying: “This study could be a game changer… You have legitimacy now from the shareholder vote. That carries weight. Leverage it to the fullest. Media coverage may very well be in your favor, too.”

Momentum from the vote is one way that #WeAreTwitter #BuyTwitter has succeeded so far at building organized power among Twitter users and shareholders.

Here is some more of what we’ve accomplished together:

• Advancing democratic ownership and accountability on the platforms we use, including a couple dozen individuals doing analysis, web design, advocacy with allies, and more.
• Dozens upon dozens of articles featuring #BuyTwitter including The Financial Times, WIRED, Salon, Recode, Vanity Fair, and The Co-op Water Cooler.
• Hundreds upon hundreds of tweets in the past week alone about #BuyTwitter, including an original love ballad on YouTube!
• A letter signed by major of coop allies, including the International Co-operative Alliance, Co-operatives UK, the National Cooperative Business Association, and Co-operatives and Mutuals Canada. You can sign it, too!
• Another letter by the International Co-op Alliance, on behalf of 2.6 million enterprises and 1 billion members worldwide.
• A poll conducted last week found that more than 2 million UK Twitter users would consider investing in a democratic Twitter.
• A Twitter Moment of selected highlights uniting #BuyTwitter, #NetNeutrality, #Coops, #corpgov, and exiting the stock market.

This is just the beginning. What’s next?

• Help build cooperative social media by joining the new Social.coop, a cooperatively owned instance of the federated, open-source Mastodon network. This is just one of many projects you can support in the #platformcoop ecosystem.
• Explore the broader movement for cooperative platforms and an Internet of Owners by attending The People’s Disruption conference in NYC and other events around the world.
• Join the organizing effort in our Loomio group. What should next year’s proposal say? Should we press on as a social media users’ union? A cooperative investment club?

I hope we can get together for an open online conversation. Until then, share our celebration tweet and have a wonderful week.

Onward,

Danny and the #WeAreTwitter team

PS: If someone you know wants a free kitten, tell them to get one here.

Photo by clasesdeperiodismo

The post Twitter, you’ve been served appeared first on P2P Foundation.

By Thomas Doennebrink

#WeAreTwitter and #BuyTwitter are the hashtags of the recently-started internet campaign to buy Twitter, the online service that has been operating in the red for years.

The kicker: Interested buyers want to turn Twitter into a “platform coop”.

US author Nathan Schneider‘s article in the Guardian mid-September, entitled “Here’s my plan to save Twitter: let’s buy it”, was the kick-off. The scholar-in-residence in media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder has long been an advocate of building “platform cooperativism” to create alternatives to the mighty  Silicon Valley internet businesses, and to counter their “platform capitalism”. He was a co-organiser of the first Platform Coop conference in November 2015 in New York, where these ideas were discussed for the first time on a broader base and with an immediately increased reach.

“But what if we changed Twitter’s economy? What if users were to band together and buy Twitter for themselves?” he writes, in a nod to the repeated commentaries from Wall Street bemoaning that Twitter is not profitable because it doesn’t expand fast enough, and how – following the logic of eternal growth mania – it should be swallowed by an even bigger bird. Pointing to the growing international movement of  platform cooperativism, he  counters with a new logic: users should be the owners of Twitter.

Nathan Schneider bespeaks that this isn’t actually a new idea. Back in 1923, a little football team called the Green Bay Packers began selling shares to their fans, instead of being traded around by billionaires. According to Schneider, this led to affordable tickets, sold-out stadiums with tasteful advertisements… “an all-around successful, sustainable business model for generations”.

Berlin’s leftish-alternative newspaper Tageszeitung, popularly know as Taz, has taken a similar path. Founded in 1978 as a bottom-up, grassroots project, it had enormous financial problems from the beginning. In 1991 it was threatened with bankruptcy and ruin. The majority of the editorial staff wanted to sell themselves out to a big investor – which never materialized. But others, like the newspaper‘s co-founder and prominent politican Hans-Christian Ströbele, were warning: “A capital investor will not tolerate in the long run that there are no profits”. In November 1991, the majority in an employee meeting finally decided to transform into a cooperative, whichshould be supported by the readership. In an enduring campaign, the newspaper called for supporters and cooperativists to sign cooperative shares of 500 German marks (almost 250€). This model turned out to be very successful, to this day! In the first year, roughly 2,500 people bought shares with a total value of more than 4 million marks (about 2 million €). Today, the media cooperative counts more than 16,000 members and stockholder equity of 12.7 million €.

Some paid their cooperative share in 20 monthly instalments; others gave 20 times the share price. In parallel, three different subscription prices were introduced: one reduced price for students and low-income earners, one normal and one solidarity price. For many years now, a number of subscribers voluntarily pay more, so that a quarter of total subscribers can pay less. This “solidarity method” also works for internet articles. Taz has declined to build a paywall, but asks for voluntary contributions instead. That way, they can raise a considerable part of their internet presence.

For this reason, Taz is one of the very few newspapers in Germany on a solid financial ground without future concerns. It was never dependent on advertising, from which they derive just 10% of its income. The slowly increasing foundation of cooperativists stay faithful to their newspaper – and the income stays fairly stable as well. The capital stock of the cooperative is raised by owners that do not expect interest,and who supply about half a million € annually for further investments. This is how the newspaper manages to continue without financing from outside capital. The cooperativists even raised the 20 million € necessary for the new building of the publishing house, due to be finished in 2017. You can check out the current status of the construction site here.

Similar to the Green Bay Packers football team, this #FairPlay also plays well for the newspaper Taz – for more than 25 years straight now. So again: #Buy Twitter? Taz has been there and done that!

There will be an update of this article released around the second Platform Cooperativism conference taking place in NYC from November 11-13, 2016. Feedback, suggestions, and recommendations as comments or private messages are highly appreciated.

Lead image: Wikipedia

The post #BuyTwitter? German newspaper Taz has been there, done that. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The organizers are bringing together fellow Twitter users to try and make a fair deal, and to:

1. Reward the creators
2. Empower the users
3. Innovate through co-ownership

Skeptical? Worried that trolls will ruin it? Fear not, its an amazing group of organizers.

You can become a part of it. Add your name to the petition here.

The post #WeAreTwitter appeared first on P2P Foundation.