The Platform Co-op Development Kit is a multi-year project that advances the cooperative digital economy. The Kit is a project by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, homed at The New School in New York City, in collaboration with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, and platform co-op communities worldwide.

The motivation behind this project is that we are approached, almost daily with the question of how to start a platform co-op. The work of the Kit is two-fold. First, we provide a range of resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. Second, we will offer tools not simply by building coop technology but technology that will allow the platform co-op ecosystem to grow. We started the co-design process by engaging five pilot platform co-ops in Brazil, Germany, Australia, the United States, and India. The pilot groups:

• 3,000 babysitters in Illinois organized by the Service Workers Union looking for an onboarding, labor, and purchasing platform;

• young urban women in Ahmedabad, India who are part of the SEWA Federation of co-ops bringing beauty services to people’s homes through an app;

• trash pickers currently operating in Sao Paolo and Recife, Brazil, whose work recycling trash makes up more than 90 percent of Brazil’s entire recycling capacity;

• refugee women in Germany, starting in Hamburg with Syrian, Albanian, and Iranian women, who plan to offer a platform co-op for child care services and elder care;

• homecare workers in Australia, the only worker co-op in social care in Australia, that is seeking to build a governance tool for its remote rural members.

All open source tools that we will design with these groups will be customizable for a range of platform co-ops in various sectors and countries.

Initiated with a $1,000,000 grant from Google.org, this project seeks to raise a total of $10,000,000.

By building a broad coalition, our team will engage people around the globe who are seeking to learn about and then build platform co-ops with their communities.

By working with pilot groups in various sectors — from home services, garbage-recycling and beauty services, to child and elder care — we will demonstrate how the cooperative approach plays out in the digital economy. We will work with co-ops, technologists, policy facilitators, researchers, and freelancers to advance the movement for a cooperative digital economy. Watch an video introduction about this work here.

Read the press releases about the Kit from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, The New School, and OCAD University. Explore how this work connects with Google.org’s “Future of Work” Initiative here. Read media coverage about the project with recent articles from Fast Company (also discussing the question of accepting Google funding), Shareable, and Philanthropy News Digest.

Goals of the Kit

Over the next two years, with the support of the platform co-op community, we will develop open source tools for use worldwide; and provide various resources such as essential legal, intellectual, and entrepreneurial resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. This work depends on collaborations with cooperators around the world coming together to support one another and advance this movement.

These goals will be met through the following deliverables:

• Creation of open source labor platforms and online governance tools through co-design processes with five pilot groups, tailored to be extensible and customizable for other platform co-ops with similar needs;

• Development of an online wikipedia-style learning commons, activated by informal as well as institutional online learning groups in several countries;

• Development of a curriculum about the cooperative digital economy to be distributed with undergraduate and graduate programs in business schools and law schools as well as acceleratorator programs;

• Creation of a data-rich, interactive map of platform co-ops, and supporting organizations and individuals;

• Development of an international network of lawyers to provide legal resources to assist the launch of (platform) co-ops;

• Development of a global narrative co-written by co-op workers, researchers, unionistas, technologists, and policymakers.

• Ongoing reports and analysis about work in progress made available to the public online, and regular calls for community engagement and input

Strategy for Achieving Goals

The design and development of the tools will be guided by the platform co-op communities themselves. Full cycles of co-design, prototyping, implementation & evaluation will ensure that the tools fulfill the needs of the community. Additionally, by working with diverse pilot organizations and populations, our team will provide essential assistance to platform coops of all stripes, and to workers with many socioeconomic backgrounds. This reverses the dominant pattern of platform development which typically excludes marginalized groups, contributing to greater economic and social inequities. The project places vulnerable and marginalized workers at the center.

Creating a supporting infrastructure for platform co-ops through a learning commons, interactive map, cooperative curriculum development, and legal resources will launch simultaneously with pilot group work. Website development will be lead by the IDRC team, and we continue to engage with a number of collaborators to generate the various components that will eventually make up the online ecosystem. To achieve both goals, time and resources will be split over the next two years, with 70% of efforts going towards the pilot groups, and 30% towards the projects’s online learning components.

Finally, the project will run as an open and transparent community. All resources and updates will be available online to any prospective or existing co-op, and all interested persons. Explore recent updates, for example, from the IDRC on the Kit and our work with the pilot groups thus far. And review our blog updates documenting recent visits with our Hamburg and SEWA pilot groups.

Through collaboration with pilot groups and by engaging individuals committed to the movement, the toolkit grows from small successes. As our work progresses, we will engage other cooperative ventures, organizations, and individuals who can contribute different resources and services to advance this critical project. Stay up to date on our work so that now or in the near future, we can draw on the expertise of the community and find ways of collaborating.

How We Will Measure Success

Grant activities started on July 1, 2018 and will conclude with Google on July 2020. Iterations of the deliverables and prototypes will be freely available and open to critique and input as our work advances. A broader measurement of the project’s impact, however, will not be available until completion.

We will consider the project a success if the Kit was implemented by low income workers in at least three pilot groups & successfully transferred to at least one other labor market. Success would be based on the evidence of higher wages, better working conditions, democratic governance within the enterprise, & potential for scaling this work to more workers. Due to the nature of this work, these metrics can only be measured upon the completion of the project. In the same way a highway’s efficacy cannot be measured while it is still under construction, so too can the pilot groups’ effects not be known until full completion and implementation.

During the project, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium will provide qualitative research investigations and progress reports on the pilot groups. Written reports will provide big-picture analysis, and highlight successes, failures, best practices, and other findings from the pilot groups. These reports will also discuss the feasibility of these models applying to other industries or regions, and when applicable, offer policy recommendations.

For strengthening the platform co-op economic movement and building an online infrastructure of support, we will fulfill these objectives:

• Engage a variety of unique platform co-ops in distinct countries to facilitate the scaling of our labor platform and distributed governance tools

•Establish active learning groups engaged with our content online in at various countries

• Deliver high profile talks and media publications about Kit work

• Create a global narrative co-written by stakeholders and make it available for translation in different languages.

• Create and distribute a curriculum to shared with business schools, law schools, undergraduate or graduate programs at universities.

• Develop policy briefs and engage different political parties to consider

• Develop and share platform co-op worker testimonials to be hosted online

• Generate traffic to the platform.coop website with blogs and a new site design

We will also use non-parametric methodologies of measurement so that we do not impose a particular notion of success onto groups that are marginalized and have already suffered from the effects of traditional “successful” interventions.

The outcomes of the Kit will be diverse and variable, but collectively the change will be significant. We hope to reach the most marginalized of platform workers and build our work from their perspective. To achieve this we need to look beyond predetermined measures of success. If we only concern ourselves with measuring success through quantitative metrics, then we would be forced to develop quick interventions that scale quickly. We would be merely recreating the platforms of the past that have contributed to existing economic and social inequities and further marginalization. That is a strategy of the exploitative, extractive companies we hope not to emulate.

Instead, the project will demonstrate that we have only scratched the surface of imagining the possibilities for the cooperative digital economy. While our work over the next two years can begin to address the urgent needs for more organized research and infrastructure to support platform co-ops, more importantly, it will lay the foundation for future researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, co-op workers, technologists, and many others to pick-up this work and carry it forward in new directions.

Please consider joining us in this critical work. We need the time and energy of many people for this work to succeed. If you think you can help, please write to us at [email protected] and we can share more on how to get involved.

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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.

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Alessia Clusini: Threading elements of the great educational experiments of Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models together with Pierre Levy’s modern definition of “collective intelligence,” La Scuola Open Source (The Open Source School) embodies the principles of the sharing movement. Its success hinges on cooperative work, co-design, shared skills, and an open source culture. The school’s 13 co-founders believe in the power of people’s collaborative qualities. Their unusual constitution is testimony to this.

I believe La Scuola Open Source has the capacity to extend from its origin in Puglia on the southern heel of Italy and inspire the acquisition of knowledge and educational development on a global scale. Recently, I talked with two of its co-founders — Lucilla Fiorentino and Alessandro Tartaglia — how digital artisans, creators, artists, designers, programmers, pirates, dreamers, and innovators are collaborating to create Italy’s most important service for social innovation and community development: education. Fiorentino and Tartaglia answered my questions in tandem.

What is La Scuola Open Source and what’s the idea behind it?

In the early part of the last century, as a result of the social and economic changes produced by the industrial revolution, an architect named Walter Gropius conceived a school in Germany aimed at creating new professionals to provide an answer to the demand of innovation generated by the changes in time. That school was Bauhaus — a place that would become a legend. It was born from the union of an art academy, a technical college and a faculty of architecture. Within a few years, combining skills and working on real projects with the help of many internationally renowned experts, a pedagogical experiment of historic proportions was born.

We believe that, today, we live in a somewhat similar condition produced by the acceleration of technology and by the sudden economic slowdown. We’re in a crisis and struggle to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The reason for this, in our opinion, is that the path to be taken is not linear. Not only should we know how to move forward and how to progress, we must also develop the ability to play on more dimensions with a cognitive agility. We also believe that the digital presence in our lives is changing more and more in our culture. All organizations are becoming cultural organizations and every product today is also product of culture.

This mutation makes the vision of the future a central issue to address and is the reason La Scuola Open Source was born. We believe that in the future there must be new kinds of professionals, new spaces for social gatherings, and new ways of learning and transmitting knowledge.

How do you apply your “educate to emancipate” motto?

?We believe that greater knowledge implies greater awareness which is exactly what we need to free ourselves and be able to look at things from different points of views. We embarked on this path because we believe in people — in what they can do together and the surplus value that is created when knowledge is shared and exchanged.

Lucilla Fiorentino, La Scuola Open Source co-founder

What is the teaching methodology?

We work co-operatively on real projects. Teachers bring knowledge and drive the process and tutors facilitate the work by organizing it; they put the process into practice. Participants work together with teachers and tutors to realize tangible projects, whether they’re robotic, IT-based, crafted, artistic, or theoretical.

In this way, by attracting teachers from around the county (and, in some cases, also from abroad), we develop skills in our territory and simultaneously bring people together. Over time, this process will allow us to rely on new skills formed in Italy due to the influence it will have on graduates.

The teaching process is connected to this research and one produces resources for the other. Teaching modules can be parameterized depending on the number of teachers, tutors, participants, duration, number of hours, field of interest and the operating mode.

How do you use Bauhaus and Roycroft Community models?

A model is something that inspires you and something you think of when envisioning all the possibilities. It is a kind of canvas on which to build your own personal history — a scheme for your reasoning, an image buried in your memory that you tend to complete through the process of interpretation.

How much has the XYLAB experience affected La Scuola Open Source?

I think being able to prototype our idea twice (X in 2013 and XY in 2014) through Laboratori dal Basso (Bottom up Labs, a regional funding program) has been a great fortune. We identified and tried even the most problematic mechanisms with a view to improve the process. We engaged with people who taught us a lot and met new people who opened our eyes to worlds we had previously ignored. This has all been crucial and allowed us to weave a large network of relationships and strengthen the outside perception of our work over time. At the same time, it’s allowed us to focus more and more on our idea, all the way to the proposal document we presented to the Che Fare application (one of Italy’s most prestigious social innovation grants) a year ago and won.

How can digital artisans, creators, artists, designers, programmers, pirates, dreamers, and innovators complete each other with a common vision?

In the institutional paradigm, many of these figures do not talk and do not relate, as it’s difficult for them to do that. According to our idea, though, they can share a dialogue, exchange pieces of knowledge, cooperate, engage with real challenges, and get their hands dirty together. This creates a fruitful opportunity where it’s possible through contamination to generate new professional figures, new ideas for products or services, and even new adequate technologies for this shifting global scenario.

Alessandro Tartaglia, La Scuola Open Source co-founder

How important is sharing in the Open Source School project?

Sharing is the foundation of contamination and the engine of everything. It is a delicate process, often regulated by empathy between individuals. Some days ago while talking with a friend we came up with the concept, “The project is the recipe, the people are the ingredients, we’ll be the oil.”

What are the commons at La Scuola Open Source?

The commons are what we share, together and with each other. In sociology, we’d speak of “collective intelligence.” According to the French philosopher Pierre Levy, the spread of communication techniques for digital media has led to the emergence of new ways of social bonding based on gathering areas of common interests, open processes of cooperation and an exchange of knowledge. We keep saying, “Innovation is always social, otherwise it’s just profiting from people’s ignorance.” Sharing knowledge is the first and most essential common for us. It generates a real process of emancipation and civilization since it enables any person to serve their community. Simultaneously, it allows each individual to freely express and enhance their uniqueness, while giving them the opportunity to appeal to all the intellectual and human qualities of the community itself.

That’s what we’ll focus on, experimenting and developing the best practices, starting from the co-design of the school itself with the triple workshop XYZ. Of the commons, this is a very important field of research for the future of humanity, and we’ll play our part.

How could you make the project sustainable and what is the economic/organizational structure?

Each module or teaching activity activated will have its own financial provision system (funding mix) such as fundraising, crowdfunding, access fees, sponsorships, project financing, etc. Research projects will be funded through agreements with companies, public administration and government agencies, as well as through EU-grant applications or any potential sponsorship. The co-living and utilization of the space will be controlled by a membership system which will allow us to cover the running costs of the space, the consumables and maintenance. Besides this, the school will secure consultancy contracts in the field of social and technological innovation with any kind of interested subject.

Describe the co-design process of La Scuola Open Source and how to participate in a project.

For 12 days during July, 24 internationally renowned teachers and tutors together with 60 participants (selected from 199 requests from Italy and abroad) took to the Old Town of Bari to work at the triple co-design workshop XYZ from morning to evening.

It was an event that drafted the three building blocks of the school (identity, tools, and processes) in preparation for the launch of its activities this October. A total immersion with a multidisciplinary approach based on cooperation and skills osmosis was the result of the direct creation of the school by its own open community.

As the school’s key concept is one of trying to aggregate and prototype new open research, teaching, mentoring, and co-living models (the four axes of the school), this will occur in relation to the patterns emerged during XYZ.

XYZ began with the identity lab — X — which has produced the iconographic stock, the creation of an ad hoc font, a website, and a publishing system. Following this, the tools workshop — Y — targeted management software, hardware (such as Arduino and Raspberry) to manage and monitor a 24/7 access to school, and open data management. Finally, the processes’ lab — Z — focused on teaching modules and policies, research projects frameworks, and the use of space and equipment depending on whether the target is public administration, a company, or an individual category of users. We identified how to integrate with territory, stakeholders and partners. All the outputs are free and available on the slidesharechannel.

The remaining summer month following XYZ will be dedicated to developing and implementing the solutions to result from the workshops.

Still, the essence is that there will never be a final result, but only a continuous flow and a constant work-in-progress that will feed itself with mutations and implementations. We, therefore, envision to host periodical XYZ labs according to an iterative and evolutionary logic.

Alessandro Balena, La Scuola Open Source program director

How important are the making and hacking philosophies for La Scuola value creation?

In a way, from the time we are born, we are all hackers. We start our lives in a world we haven’t created and we learn to modify it over time with our actions. But there is a huge semantic battle around the very word “hacker.” Some would paint hackers as IT pirates who steal sensitive data, but there are those who wish to spread values of openness, freedom, and trust.

For us, the hacker ethic (as opposed to the protestant work ethic) is a key issue. In addition to the “open source” element which in its incremental logic (fork, versioning, etc.) represents the blueprint of a cultural system of new values by being collaborative, adaptive, and recursive, we should use this approach in all fields of knowledge in order to ensure new possibilities for everyone. The methodology and the goals of this project are themselves the subject of a reflection on social innovation which aim to “hack the educational system.”

How can openness and diversity be inextricably linked with the concepts of the Mediterranean and the south of Italy?

Being at the center of the Mediterranean, we are necessarily placed amidst profound issues such as the relationship with others, connection between worlds, contamination, social inclusion, and social innovation. We’d like to keep the Mediterranean ‘biodiversity’: a melting pot of people, cultures, food and nature. It’s particularly crucial in a time like this when thousands and thousands of refugees land on our shores — each with their own story, skills, and desire to feel at home.

It is essential to be open, particularly to that which is different from us because there is a potential that would remain unexpressed in the event of closure. We, therefore, deeply believe in sharing and openness and are aware of the social and cultural role we could have. We must be open — open-hearted and open-minded.

Who is your target? Who will benefit from La Scuola Open Source?

We’ll work with children, seniors, unemployed people, professionals, students, and researchers. For each category, we’ll elaborate teaching modules and research projects. We’ll try to mix multiple categories and different generations in order to foster mutual contamination.

The school is primarily aimed at three main categories of users:
• Those who have something to learn— individuals and those connected to the school through a membership relationship.
• Those who require research/innovation — organizations and institutions connected to the school through counseling or research relationships.
• The whole society — that in the long haul will be the end recipient of our activities by openly accessing the outputs generated in the school and be able to take part in our activities as members.

How was it to involve partners of social innovation such as Ex Fadda and Rural Hub, scientific projects such as Societing and Nefula, as well as sharing economy players like OuiShare and public institutions?

Ours is an artisanal weaving work. In the words of Italo Calvino, “We seek whom or what is not hell amongst the hell we live in every day by trying to defend and give them space.”

How can people be involved and participate to La Scuola Open Source?

By appliying to XYZ via the online form, becoming part of our community, and through a membership system which will allow access to a range of activities as soon as la Scuola is ready to commence.

Activities will go from basic making and hacking courses to recycle workshops, vertical thematic formats (singularity), lectures, access to technologies and networks, to XYLAB research and co-planning labs as well as humanistic activities related to different disciplines.

More channels:

• FB: http://facebook.com/scuolaopensource
• TW: http://twitter.com/LascuolaOS
• YT: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgyAMMIo39md4_dJ0DWKZRg
• Slideshare: http://slideshare.net/lascuolaopensource

Translation by Nicole Stojanovska.

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