This video was filmed at New Frontiers / Te Tūhura Nuku – November 2018 in Upper Hutt, New Zealand.

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Members of The Open Co-op have been promoting the idea that new software could, potentially, revolutionise both our failing democracies and our predatory capitalist economies, since 2004. Back then we weren’t quite so clear on exactly how the required information architecture should be designed – but we knew what we wanted it to do and how it should work. In 2004, I published a paper entitled Participatory Democracy Networks, which explained how I thought some new information architecture could facilitate participatory democracy worldwide.

The above diagram illustrates the undemocratic nature of the current system and the required power relationships of a truly democratic system. The extent to which any ‘player’ controls any other is represented by the extent to which its colour encapsulates any other. For example, in the current situation individuals influence business to some extent (by buying things) and the government to some extent (by voting) but do not control them, individuals only control the NGOs.

Not long after that we founded The Open Co-op and designed some screenshots of our “dream communication system” which we called PlaNet, to illustrate how the new software we wanted might work, and developed a presentation using some fictional cartoon characters to illustrate how a system like PlaNet could help people live together in a collaborative sustainable economy.

In 2017 we updated the PLANET screenshots – presenting the idea as An open source operating system for a collaborative, sustainable economy incorporating a range of interlinked apps on a smart phone. PLANET is still not a software project, it remains a vision which aims to illustrate some of the concepts and advantages of a collaborative, user owned and managed economic platform.

The purpose of the PLANET concept is to illustrate, through a Graphical User Interface, what it might be like to interact with a new economic system which has been built collaboratively as an open source project. PLANET would be owned and controlled by its members, giving them complete control over how it is run via proposals, and votes on other members’ proposals. PLANET incorporates concepts such as: Agent-centric architecture, Personal data licenses, Portable reputation, Alternative currencies, Group management, Local relevance and Delegative voting – all the same ideas we were proposing in 2004 to help build participatory democracy networks.

So, for 12 years PLANET has remained a dream. And then we discovered Holochain.

Whilst everyone has been getting very excited about the potential of blockchain we have remained skeptical for a variety of reasons;

1. You cannot store all the data in the world in a blockchain
2. The blockchain is a spectacular waste of energy that could instead be used to improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world – just see the insane energy consumption of Bitcoin. If growth continues at the present pace, researchers estimate that Bitcoin mining alone would consume more power in 2020 than the entire world does today.
3. A system that is designed to enable total anonymity is actually not very appropriate for building collaborative, trust-based systems and organisations.

Sometimes technology gets over-hyped and there’s a growing body of evidence explaining why you don’t need to use blockchain. This paper by Karl Wüst and Arthur Gervais from the Department of Computer Science in Zurich, gives a good outline of whether a blockchain is the appropriate technical solution to solve a problem.

Flow chart to determine whether a blockchain is the appropriate technical solution to solve a problem – Karl Wüst & Arthur Gervais

Whilst blockchain has and is being used on some great projects, this amazing story from inside a Jordanian refugee camp that runs on blockchain to help Syrian refugees regain legal identities that were lost when they fled their homes, is the perfect example of how the technology is failing to deliver. To quote the conclusions “the transactions were slow and the fees were too high” … ” so “Instead of cutting the banks out of the equation, [the World Food Programme] has essentially become one”. Haddad, who runs the programme acknowledges that—“Of course we could do all of what we’re doing today without using blockchain…”. But, he adds, “my personal view is that the eventual end goal is digital ID, and beneficiaries must own and control their data.”

Owning and controlling your own data. That’s what we want. That’s the fundamental idea behind PLANET.

But trying to force a system like blockchain, which was designed to enable anonymous transactions, to help you own and control your own data is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. Wouldn’t it be better to start with a system which is specifically designed to enable you to own and control you own data? That also, by design, encourages trust between peers and, as well as that, enables giant volumes of transactions at low transaction costs?

That’s what Holochain does. And it does it very well.

Whilst some people have been embarrassing humanity by creating mind-numbing concepts such as Crypto-kitties and trying to force tomatoes on a blockchain, the team at Holo have been figuring out the fundamental information architecture for a new, sustainable, collaborative and cooperative economy. Such a valiant and laudable mission is clearly not for the faint-hearted and the Holo team brings together brains such as Eric Harris-Braun, Arthur Brock, Jean Russell, Jean-François Noubel, and Matthew Schutte to name just a few. They are an incredible group of system-thinkers whose ideas have evolved out of the metacurrency project and CEPTR and synergised as Holochain, a new applications framework that they are giving away to the world for free.  To help subsidize that effort, they are also launching the first flagship application built using Holochain, a peer-to-peer web hosting platform, confusingly named Holo host, for which they recently raised over $20 million through a crowdfunding campaign and an Initial Community Offering.

In order to explain what Holochain is, how it works and why co-operators everywhere should take note, we interviewed their Director of Communications.

OSB: What is Holo in layman’s terms?

MS: Holo is a peer to peer app hosting marketplace. Today app hosting is the domain of big business. If a developer builds an app, they serve it via a hosting company like Amazon or Google and pay to use their big data warehouses – huge sever farms which present the app to end users. Holo makes it possible for normal folks to make use of the idle storage and processing capacity on their computers to get into that business… For example, when I’m writing an email, my machine is doing some work but it has the capacity to do 1000 times more work – so HOLO enables you to rent some of that extra capacity.

OSB: OK, that sounds great, but I can imagine people worrying it might slow down their computers. Is that something users will need to think about?

MS: You can set your own parameters. You can specify the settings for how much of your machine you allocate to Holo – Our goal is to prioritise your use over Holo’s use (although this may not be included in the initial version at launch) so you never get slowed down. Some people will be dedicating whole machines to Holo hosting… but if you’re using Holo on your main computer you don’t want it to be annoying… you just want it to make use of the spare capacity. If it’s reducing your quality of life – that’s not a cost most people are going to be willing to pay.

OSB: Will it be secure? I can imagine people worrying that if a Holo service or app is running in the background on their computer then maybe it can access parts of their machine that they don’t want people to see.

MS: Yes, it’s secure. It only has the ability to interact with certain parts of your computer. This is similar to the way in which a web site can change pixels on your screen but can’t read your private files. Technically it’s called “sandboxing”. Holo will use a cordoned off section of your computer. We’re not inventing new stuff there, the technology to do this securely has existed for a long time.

OSB: Will people need a special computer, or a certain specification of computer to run Holo?

MS: No. Any Mac or PC, desktop or laptop will work but mobile devices are slower and so not so suitable for serving websites to others.

OSB: Why would someone want to host HOLO apps on their computer? How is that going to help build a collaborative, sustainable economy?

MS: It’s kind of like the way AirBnb and Uber work. Their model enables them to make use of spare bedrooms – to help people pay off their mortgages. Holo makes use of the spare space and processing power of your computer to help you pay for your internet connection and maybe even the cost of the computer itself…

There is a massive amount of unused computing power in the world, more than any one company controls… Amazon is king of hosting at the moment, though there are others that are neck and neck, like IBM and Google.

Amazon is the third most valuable company on the planet and their web hosting division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes up 10% of Amazon’s revenues but more profit than the entire rest of the company combined. App hosting is the cash cow of the third most most valuable company on the planet!

Holo is aiming to do to Amazon’s cash cow what Uber did to Taxis – but instead of taking 20 or 30% of the money from the drivers (like Uber does) with Holo 99% of the revenues go straight to the host who’s computer is doing the work.  Holo takes a 1% or less transaction fee.

OSB: I see, so Holo has the potential to disrupt the hosting industry and divert money back to the people who join the network and host apps on their computers. But, if you’ve invented a way to do that why wouldn’t you take more than 1%?

MS: We don’t need it – because we’re distributing everything… just like Airbnb was able to grow from two guys with air mattresses to a company that books more rooms than any other… because they didn’t have to build and own locations – we’re catalysing existing assets instead. We’ve invented a really efficient accounting system – and a 1% transaction fee is our business model for Holo. And that helps subsidize the larger Holochain ecosystem. This is just a first step in a larger plan to shift how humanity communicates.

OSB: OK, I thought so – there’s clearly more lurking under the hood! But before we dive into that I want to take a step back and try and get a real understanding of what Holochain is and how this idea works. You’ve told us a bit about Holo, which is a Holochain app.  Can you explain the technology behind Holochain itself a bit more?

MS: Sure. Peer to peer app hosting is not a new idea. Just like BitTorrent offers peer to peer file sharing, Holochain makes use of some of the same technology.

A few decades ago people realized that it would be useful to be able to store a file on a network of computers, but not have to depend on having any single computer be up and running at a particular time in order to access them.  Note that with the web, when you look up a website, you are looking up content based on which machine it is stored on. That means that if that machine goes down, you can’t access that content. That kind of sucks. It’s also a major reason why most people don’t host their own websites anymore.  If for any reason your computer goes down, no one can reach your website. This “server maintainer as second job” thing was a pain in the neck, so most folks opted to pay others to “do that hosting work.”

With BitTorrent, it’s different. When you reach out for a file, you don’t ask for a specific machine. You ask for the file. Other machines on the network share information about which files are stored where. Within a split second, you’ve got your file (or at least have started to download it). This even works if every computer that originally received the file has since gone offline.  That’s because if a computer notices that one of its neighbors has gone offline, it starts making backups by recruiting new machines to hold onto a copy of that file.

For example, if I send a tweet – it might get stored by 200 different computers. If one drops offline, the system looks for others to make backup copies to ensure 200 copies remain online – these nodes are “gossiping” with each other – if they don’t hear back when they check in with the ‘Oli node’, they say “oh no, we lost him!” and then look for the next nearest node (what “nearness” means is a bit too technical for this interview). Jimmy is the nearest – so they get Jimmy’s node to make a copy to ensure 200 copies stay online. It’s like a self healing network.

That’s great for file storage – but not to run apps, you can’t run Airbnb like that. You can’t run Uber like that.  Apps need to build sets of relationships and transform resources. Holochain takes the file sharing concept and adds more functionality. Borrowing from three different technologies in the process:

1. From BitTorrent – self healing storage, the Distributed Hash Table (DHT)
2. From Blockchain and other things – the concept of an immutable, unchangeable, tamper proof data log. A hash chain.
3. From Git, the most widely used system for collaborative software – the Agent centric model, where there is no one global truth.

In the Git world, I have my version of the code. If I make a copy and add a green button, altering the code, I can suggest the change to you. If you like the change and accept it, you sign it with a cryptographic key, just like track changes in a Word doc. When you suggest changes it shows them to me. If I accept this change, and I sign that acceptance with my cryptographic key, it updates my chain to include the changes I accept. But you can’t change my stuff. I have to update my stuff. As a sovereign agent.

Holochain is an agent centric model which is very different to the data centric model of blockchain. There are no miners, and no company in the middle deciding and enforcing the rules.  Instead, the participants of a particlar of the network running it as a community. By pooling together our computing resources we make possible an entire network of distributed apps that are free from centralised, corporate control. By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

By putting that scale of control back into the hands of users, we enable humanity to access entirely new possibilities for how we do economics, governance and community.

OSB: That’s awesome, it sounds like you’ve developed a system to run something like PLANET, the open source OS we’ve been thinking about for so long. But if this is going to work the peer to peer network will need to grow pretty quickly, is that where the HoloPorts come in?

Aside:

As well as running possibly the world’s first ever ethically (rather than purely finically) motivated ICO, which raised £20 million, the Holo team also recently closed a crowdfunder for Holo ports, which raised over $1 million. The supply of ‘Holo Tokens’ which were sold in the ICO was calculated by a fixed formula based on data from the crowdfunding campaign for HoloPorts. HoloPorts are “plug and play” devices which come with software already installed and are optimized to run Holo. When they arrive with the 2114 users who purchased them through the crowdfunder people can just plug them in, follow the instructions, and start hosting the network and earning Holo fuel.

MS: Holo is a bridge between the old internet and the new internet. The people who are running holo are the bridge builders who get paid for building the bridge. So, normal internet users don’t have to do anything new – they might not even know that when they visit a website, on the backend, there is a community rather than a company.

OSB: I love the fact that Holo’s currency, Holo fuel, is both backed by computer processing power and designed to work as a mutual credit system.

MS: Holo also provides a new accounting process, which solves two problems: giant volumes of transactions and low transaction costs. We don’t even need to own the structures to do the accounting – we’re using a distributed app for that too – a payment system, so we are able to offer payment processing as well as hosting – for less than anyone currently offers. We’ll be able to process millions or billions of simultaneous payments – and have them work even when the transaction value is 1 cent or less. I’m not going to send you 2p if it costs me 20p to do so… We think we’ve solved an important issue.  The cost of accounting needs to be far less than the values exchanged.

OSB: Absolutely. I’ve seen that very problem plague existing blockchain projects, so I really hope it is something Holo solves. Speaking of finances, you seemed to take great care to ensure the ICO was ethically managed and you’ve now raised a huge amount of money! What are your first plans with your new resources?

MS: Our goals were clear:

1. Get this off the ground – launch the change
2. Make sure the humans get taken care of for their part in that…

It’s a principle we’re going to follow with the whole community of hosts, and ICO investors. We’ve been trying to design the architecture so people end up better off by participating. We’re taking care of our staff and the community that are trying to get the software built. But we’re not trying to become billionaires.

Our people have been living on $1000/month stipend and volunteering their time.

Two years ago I was sleeping in my car to be able to work on this full time. I hard to rent out my bedroom on Airbnb, so I could work on this without having to work on other stuff.  That generally meant that I would sleep in the car. Now our project has market cap worth hundreds of millions. But we’ll let that happen… it’s just people betting that we’ll be successful. The point is that now we have the resources we need, the ability to pay people and pull in deep knowledge.

OSB: How is the Holo organisation going to evolve?

MS: We’re in a transition period. We didn’t do anything in the normal way. We didn’t give any equity in the company to investors. We didn’t even give equity to the employees. I don’t have equity, for instance, because our intent is to hand over control of the resources to the community over time.

We’re aiming to start by using a CoBudget-like process so that our community will control 1 to 3 % of the revenue. There will be a learning process, so the community can build up it’s ability to make decisions and exercise judgement about how to allocate resources, towards training / UI / development / security tools etc. Over time the plan is to increase the amount of the revenue which the community controls until the community controls all of the revenue.

We’re also launching a Trust that controls Holochain. That trust receives 50% of Holo’s revenues and that will help to support Holochain and nourish the growth of the network. Basically we’ve managed to hack together a funding mechanism for Holochain, despite the fact that we are completely giving Holochain away for free.

OSB: So, do you think Holo will help liberate decentralised co-operation at scale?

MS: We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

We’re hacking business structures in order to try to change what types of business models are possible in the world.

This concept of putting users in the middle will completely shift how co-ops can function. It will enable them to make use of the advantage that they have, which is diversity. What we are calling platform co-ops and protocol co-ops – coming together in alignment to create an ecosystem rather than just a network. So we can try new things and if they prove useful, they can propagate across the community and perhaps beyond. The “beyond” comes from the fact that users can bridge between different networks.  That means that I can draw data from 5 or 10 apps and combine them together to create a more coherent user experience for myself. And I don’t need anyone else to agree to also use that particular configuration. If it works for me, I can put it to work. No group meetings and voting required (for that sort of issue, anyway.),

No more top down, or one-size fits all application experiences, that’s centralised corporate architecture. New ways of digital commutation are going to harness the diversity of co-ops and help give them a learning advantage. This will allow them to experiment and learn faster than centralised organisations – a collaborative advantage in a world that changing fast.

Part 2 of this interview – exploring more of Holo’s plans to enable decentralised co-operation at scale is coming soon…

Matthew Schutte and Art Brock from Holochain will both be speaking at the OPEN 2018 Platform Co-ops conference in London in July – as well as running hands-on workshops on how to download the source code and design apps to work on Holochain.

We’re not the only people who are starting to get excited about Holochain, the concept has caught many other eyes. With developers like Nicolas Luck explaining how Holochain is reinventing applications and how it “works and performs better than Ethereum by several orders of magnitude”, and Jean Russell sharing 5 Ways Holochain can save democracy, momentum is starting to build.

In his post about Holochain reinventing applications Nicolas shares his vision, explains the shift from data-centric to agent-centric architecture and proposes building a Holo browser:

“I am talking about a browser for the Holochain app ecosystem that is not opening HTML documents but instead is facilitating communication between the user and other users, groups, teams, organizations and the network as a whole. Think: decentralized WeChat. Basically a very generalized address book/team chat/social network/collaboration UI with no specialized functionality as that is to be filled-in by those many apps which are meant to work together as micro-services.”

That is exactly what we have tried to illustrate with PLANET, which is why this is all so exciting. If the users co-own and co-design the browser which Nicolas describes we will finally have a framework within which we can build a democratic, collaborative, sustainable economy – the perfect framework for decentralised cooperation at scale.

Photo by scloopy

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Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

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Since 2015 Outlandish have spent £192,450 in Cobudget across 34 buckets.

Kate Beecroft interviews Brian Spurding, from the web services coop Outlandish about their use of Cobudget. Originally published in Greater than/finance. 

A web services consultancy based in London, Outlandish is a worker owned cooperative.

They use Cobudget to democratically distribute dividends to all cooperative members as a way to invest in new projects they care about, for example new tech products, social impact projects that need software, match funding of international initiatives.

We talked to Outlander Brian Spurling about how they have been using Cobudget.

How does Cobudgeting work at Outlandish?

At Outlandish the Cobudget process works like this: every quarter, the surplus is distributed proportionally according to the hours that people have spent working for Outlandish. This money goes to everyone’s Cobudget accounts. From there, these funds can be allocated to different ‘buckets’ — buckets are projects that people from Outlandish have proposed.

Anyone who is either a member of the cooperative or close collaborator — called ‘Outlanders‘ — can create proposals for projects to be funded.

Mandatory information for these proposals is the description of the project goals, as well as the people who will be working on the project and the estimated time and money needed for the work. The projects should all in some way or another serve Outlandish’s mission and theyshould not be core expenses or costs of the business.

What have been some of your most funded projects?

Featured amongst the funded projects have been a prototype for the site schoolcuts.org.uk. This site features an interactive infographic to show how your local schools are being de-funded. It turned from a successful Cobudget project into a commercial project in cooperation with the National Union of Teachers and won silver at the digital impact awards 2017.

Another big investment by Outlandish has been Daugher of Social Monitor, a project to develop an existing system into a product offering. With no sales opportunities in the pipeline, this is a great example of how Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.

“Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.” — Brian Spurling

One of our favourite clients (a research organisation fighting corruption in Papua New Guinea) brought us a great project idea. We identified some additional tech we could build — stuff that would be good for them and interesting for us — so we match-funded their budget (£32, 250). This was a huge success.

Screenshot of one of the projects Outlandish funded on Cobudget

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What has changed since you started using Cobudget to spend your surplus?

Before Cobudget, it was easy to spend small amounts of surplus (<£5,000), because an individual member could sign this off themselves. But it was hard to do anything bigger than that because there was no defined framework on how to make those decisions.

“The way Outlandish makes decisions about our surplus has changed dramatically. Pre-Cobudget, there was a lack of transparency and the authority to spend the surplus was limited to the co-ops members.” — Brian Spurling

This could have been defined without using Cobudget, of course. But with Cobudget, not only is the spending of the surplus now transparent, but anybody working at Outlandish can propose projects, and funds can be distributed directly to individuals. It is the combination of these three elements that make it so transformative for how we manage our surplus.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to learn more about the tool Cobudget, read more here.

For further resources and use cases, check out our Guide to Collaborative Finance.

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This article is based on a presentation given at Disrupting the Disruptors Platform Coop conference, 9 September 2017, Toronto.

Chloe Waretini: You might have heard the saying ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast.’ It’s the idea that we can put in whatever strategy and structure that we want in our organisations, but culture will always trump it if it isn’t aligned.

I preparing this talk, I sat with the question of ‘what is the wealth coops are uniquely placed to create in this time in the world?’

When we look at the disruption companies like Uber and AirBnB have generated and the cost on society, how are coops best placed to respond? What is the missing ingredient in these companies that stopped them making life better for everyone?

I’d argue that it’s the culture that lives in their organisations.

Wait, what? Isn’t the problem that they were in a profit-maximizing structure and had no care for the industries they disrupted?? Yes, AND where do these come from? What is it that makes this ok, even celebrated? It’s the cultural paradigm that we’re in, reinforced by the culture of what is ‘success’ at work.

“Uber didn’t come out of nowhere, it came out of a culture and networks. We need to build the alternative.”

– Nathan Schneider, Platform Coops Conference 9 September

These organisations are set up with the vision of success as ‘getting ahead’. The one who claims the best territory and holds it wins. This goes for both the company and the people in it. Individuals are a fractal of the values of the whole. The ones who ‘get ahead’ are the ones willing to dominate, coerce, compete and fight. It pays to be out for yourself, distrustful of others and protective of your territory.

If you’re not someone willing to play this game, then your powerlessness is reinforced.

Credit — Kira Auf der Heide unsplash.com

“Toxic leaders aren’t just a bunch of bad apples in a barrel that need to be tossed out. They are employing a social strategy that works for them, given the institutional structure of the U.S. Army … The current institutional structure breeds toxic leaders … The only solution to this problem is a change in the institutional social environment.”

– David Sloan Wilson, Why Groups Fail

Credit — Benjamin Child unsplash.com

The humans we become at work

Think about how much of our lifetimes we spend at ‘work’, how this culture shapes us — our sense of self, how to relate to others, what is possible in the world.

Cooperatives were developed to address inequality, poor working conditions, create democracy and fairness. But without creating a strong cultural foundation of collaboration and humanism, they can get eaten by the predominant ‘dog-eat-dog’ work culture.

Imagine, if instead, the social environment in our organisations bred a different kind of culture? One where co-generation trumped individual genius, where you could safely assume that everyone else was thinking and acting in the interest of the whole, the difference between us was a creative resource instead of something to be managed, and compromise is a thing of the past?

Sounds pretty utopian huh? But it’s what a group of us have been prototyping for the past six years in New Zealand and around the world. This experiment is called Enspiral.

We started off as a freelancers collective dedicated to working together to more easily win highly-paid work so that we could spend the rest of our time working on stuff that really matters. We defined core values of collaboration, autonomy, transparency, diversity, entrepreneurialism, non-hierarchy.

As our numbers swelled, so did the complexity of our endeavour. Instead of being one company, we were over a dozen — linked by a central foundation. There are currently over 200 people in our organisation, all of which have open access to participate in our decision-making and financial management.

To cope with this complexity, we developed tools like Loomio for collaborative decision-making and Cobudget for participatory budgeting. Other groups became interested in operating like us and adopted our tools, structure and processes. But a strange thing happened. They still often didn’t collaborate well. There was something missing. In 2015 I was given the job of finding out what that was… It was the enabling culture that they lacked.

Credit — Chloe Waretini & Nanz Nair

How collaborative culture gets created

It’s easy to understand how to build software and structure, but how does culture get made? What was creating the particular social behaviours and norms in the society of Enspiral that was giving us the collaborative advantage?

“Enspiral believes solutions to humanity’s biggest challenges demand a new way of relating to each other”

– Enspiral Member

In studying Enspiral vs other groups in North America with similar ideals, some differences became evident. We had particular practices in the way we went about our work which paved the way for a different cultural mindset [Read here : 10 ways to make groups work better].

Through these practices and cultivation of a collaborative mindset, we each became different humans — re-cultured if you like. Work became a practice-ground to become the kinds of people that we need to become to create deep solidarity, dismantle inequality and toxic power dynamics. In essence, together we developed the human abilities required to make the paradigm shift the world is crying out for :

• Systems literacy (embracing the complexity of reality)
• Non-naive trust (assuming that your collaborators want to build you up)
• Flexibility and response-ability (adapting in dynamic realities and constant change)
• Collective intelligence through inter-subjectivity (letting go of the construct of objective truth)
• Surrendering control (actually the group is smarter than you are)
• Deep empathy and ability to use emotions in service of what we were creating together (yes you can bring your feelings here)
• Naming and navigating power dynamics (no there is no such thing as a flat power structure)
• Dancing between autonomy and collaboration (self-leadership and shared leadership)
• Lifelong learning (continual experiments and prototyping, insatiable reading)

Credit — Enspiral

This was especially evident at our Members gathering in February this year. There were a number of us who had been journeying together in Enspiral for 5 years and the amount of personal development was astounding — each of us knew that we would not be who we are today without Enspiral.

Credit — Matt Seymour unsplash.com

Coops as cultural platforms

This conference is about technology platforms and the disruptive impact they can have on society. But I urge you to also think about the cultural platform we’re building, and pay as much attention to this as the technology we develop.

Donella Meadows writes succinctly about the 9 most effective places to intervene for systems change. Number 6 is material flows (e.g. money), number 3 is the distribution of power. Coop structures can attend to these. But number 1 is ‘the mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, power structure, rules, its culture — arises’.

Can you identify the mindset your coop is operating from? Is it of the same paradigm that got us into this divided world or is it one that transform society to create solidarity and regeneration? Is your coop eating culture for breakfast or are you being eaten?

Read:

• Transformative principles and practices to make groups work better — Chloe Waretini
• Enspiral Tales on Medium
• Why Groups Fail (Hint: For the Same Reasons that Nations Fail) — David Sloan Wilson, Evonomics
• Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System — Donella Meadows, Academy for Systems Change
• Reinventing Organisations — Fredrick Laloux
• An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization — Robert Kegan

Thanks to Susan Basterfield and Peter Jacobson.

Republished from Medium

The post Culture eats coops for breakfast appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The spec could be something like this:

+ Groups could easily create a Pool, which is a Delaware LLC with co-op-like, boiler-plate bylaws, such as shared ownership among members, shared investment, commitment to social good, etc. It could also be a legal co-op somewhere if we can find the right jurisdiction. Maybe the membership of the main group wouldn’t be the same as its Pool—some additional investment or commitment might be required—or maybe it would be.

+ Using tools like Loomio and/or CoBudget, members of the Pool could make proposals and vote on decisions about what to do with the funds they pool. Groups could decide what the threshold for a decision is as part of a small set of variables in the back-end. But the principle of one-person-one-vote would be hardwired.

+ Pools could be modular swarms, making it easy to combine or disconnect around projects of shared interest—call them Floods. Together, they could use the decision-making tools to determine how to use their combined resources. This way, lots of these mini co-ops could federate and cooperate.

A result of this is that lots and lots of people could quickly become cooperativists without necessarily gulping down lots of co-op ideology. It’d be a simple, obvious way of funding group projects. And this in itself would have huge educational effect; it would demonstrate how practical and easy democratic resource-management can be.

Does this idea hold water, so to speak? What is it missing? What would be needed to make it work?

Cross-posted from the Internet of Ownership. Go to the original post to read a follow-up discussion on the comments.

The post Pools: A Proposal for One-Click Co-ops in Online Groups appeared first on P2P Foundation.