Cities have been caught in the middle of a clash: They are stuck competing for business investments while, simultaneously, seeking to meet the needs of their inhabitants through access to public goods and social services. For this reason, there is no surprise in seeing two opposite trends growing globally: On the one hand, the commodification of cities — where public spaces are sold to private buyers at the expense of citizens fenced out by these transactions; on the other hand, and likely in reaction to this privatization, there is a growing trend where cities are turning into ecosystems for collaboration, cooperation, and sharing.

These examples demonstrate why urban commons are so important for a sharing city. When there are more urban commons, more residents can directly experience the effectiveness and empowerment of sharing practices. They cultivate the skills needed to create a sharing city by commoning over smaller urban resources, like parks, and becoming more familiar with working together and sharpening their capacities to govern the whole city as a commons. These communities show how — with the right mix of commoning — all cities could become sharing cities. —Ryan Conway and Marco Quaglia 

These four short case studies are adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.”

1.  LiquidFeedback: Free and Open-source Civic Engagement Software

E-governance is the state’s use of communication technology to provide information and services to the public. Many cities have successfully implemented such systems to give people access to ongoing policy discussions, provide input on local policies, or even make proposals for official consideration. Though these efforts can enhance civic engagement, the bulk of the digital consultation platforms are proprietary and, therefore, carry a hefty price tag that many cities cannot afford. LiquidFeedback is a collaborative decision making software that is both free and open-source. That means it is freely available for anyone to install, maintain, and modify — although they may need the help of a computer technologist to put it into place. The Public Software Group in Berlin had initially developed it for use within political parties and community organizations, but in 2015 they scaled it up to expand its application to e-governance. Since then, several cities in Germany and across Europe have incorporated LiquidFeedback into their digital consultation systems. —Ryan Conway 

2. Club of Gdansk: Cross-Sector Collaboration for Urban Administration and Planning 

While the port city of Gdansk was ravaged by World War II, a majority of its population was either lost or displaced during its many years of heavy conflict. Today, however, the Polish city is a modern and vibrant urban center in eastern Europe. Having only relatively recently caught up with other European cities in terms of economic development, the city looked for ways to improve its quality of life. The city created the Club of Gdansk, an informal think tank for civil society groups and grassroots organizers to collaborate with city leaders to design and develop the Gdansk’s long term strategy. What began as an experiment in enabling bottom-up processes to identify priority issues, eventually became a fixture of the city’s administration. Core to the Club’s civil society and government members is their commitment to a set of values, which includes transparency, self-de- termination, and “courage to act.” Over the years, the Club of Gdansk has transformed the city and brought about a wave of institutional reorganization supported by the city administration. It has successfully involved tens of thousands of citizens and made them active co-creators of city policies. —Ryan Conway

3. Neighborhood Partnership Network: Empowering Residents to Participate in City Planning 

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina revealed longstanding economic and racial inequalities in New Orleans, with low-income people of color having been left most vulnerable to the disaster. Even those who managed to escape the storm returned to fi nd public services had become privatized, their housing demolished by developers, and their access to basic needs almost nonexistent. Amid the chaos, many people self-organized to support and provide mutual aid to each other. From this, the Neighborhood Partnership Network (NPN) emerged to empower residents to take part in city planning. Since 2006, the NPN has connected neighborhoods through regular meetings, a weekly newsletter, and a self-published journal. NPN has held a Capacity College that builds individual and organizational capacity through workshops and classes on topics ranging from stormwater management to filing public records requests. Furthermore, it was a pivotal advocate for pushing through changes to New Orleans’ City Charter, which requires the city to implement “a system for organized and effective neighborhood participation in land-use decisions and other issues that a ect quality of life.” —Ryan Conway

4. Open Source App Loomio Used to Govern 200-person Artist Collective 

Gängeviertel Collective emerged in 2009 following the occupation of 12 buildings in the center of Hamburg, Germany, next to the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, and Exxon-Mobile. The original motivation for the occupation was to create affordable space for local artists to live and work while saving the historic buildings from development. The collective is governed by a weekly general assembly which every member can attend, and where they can speak out, and vote. However, for more complex decisions requiring detailed preparation, the community uses Loomio, an open-source collective decision-making app created by the Loomio Cooperative. This online tool can quickly and easily take input from all community members and, after adequate feedback collection and deliberation on Loomio, bring the decision back to the main assembly for a final vote. The software was used for decisions about the potential ownership structure of the collective’s housing and remodeling of the main gathering place. —Neal Gorenflo

Longer versions of the above case studies can be found in our book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Header image by Štefan Štefančík via Unsplash

The post 4 Initiatives That Empower Collaborative Decision-Making 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.

Introduction: MaaS vs MaaC

Mobility has become a basic need for people. The quality of life for people is closely related to access to mobility. The question arises whether mobility should not be treated as such, as a public good, as commons. Partly this is already the case, roads and public transport systems are financed largely with public money. However, the voice of citizens and hence users is rarely heard when it comes to the development of our mobility, we depend on the decisions made by politicians and executive boards. These choices are often poorly justified and some propositions made are demonstrably unwise and futile and solely proposed for political gain. Mobility is at present a political and public issue and we, the people, are not part of the decision making process.
I would like to propose to use a different strategy and manage our mobility and space requirements as commons. It concernes a radically new way of decision making on the vehicles and especially the necessary infrastructure to be created and how we maintain and operate these vehicles and infrastructure. Mobility as a Commons, instead of Mobility as a Service.
The transition takes places on the axes:

• the shift from ownership to access
• automation

Both developments are very promising and we already have most of the technical details figured out to start implementing new concepts. In this article I want to explain what that means in a utopian future vision and what initiatives we can take today to allow MaaC on a small scale and thus set this transition in motion.

Utopia

The Natural City is a laboratory for utopian thinking. For the transport transition I’m working on a transition based on a utopia. A destination that we never reach because Utopia is by definition unattainable. Utopia’s unattainability is also its strength. Since the utopia is not the goal, we can not fail, and it can serve as inspiration. Since the utopia is based on concepts that are technically and socially possible, we can continue to adapt this vision of utopia with new insights and shape the transition. Utopia and the transition are therefore flexible designs that are infinitively in development.

The transition

The transition is the indefinite time span between today and utopia. This period will also need to be designed, especially when talking about complex issues such as urban mobility. Designing starts at the end, so from utopia back to today.

Mobility

As stated above, developments in mobility are set on two axes, the shift from ownership to access and automation. On both issues a completely new paradigm will not be created overnight. The transition should be designed. Technological developments provide opportunities and social developments are slowly pushing for a change in behaviour. Both need to be developed with a utopian vision in mind.

Imagination

If we do not collectively imagine what we want, others, mostly commercial parties, will shape the future of our mobility. A self-fulfilling prophecy, not based on vision, but based on predictions and commercial interests. Take a close look at Uber and you might get an idea of where we will be headed if we do not take control.

Utopia: MaaC

A city where no fossil fuels are required for the mobility needs of its residents and visitors. In this city, every place is connected through a network of high-quality vehicles. This network consists of vacuum tubes with a diameter of 1.5 meters. The capsules moving through these tubes are accelerated with the aid of magnetic levitation and superconductivity. The size of the vehicles is based on a large car and optimised to ensure that virtually all goods shipped around the globe fit therein. For people, the capsules have an optimised design for travel comfort.

The system is fully automated and the network is as dense as our current road network. Each part of the network has its own speed. 60km/h within cities, 300km/h on a regional scale, 1500km/h at a national scale and up to to 3000km/h for continental transport. With a maximum speed of 6500 km/h for intercontinental transport no place on earth is out of reach. The costs for the construction and maintenance of this system are so low that every inhabitant of the earth can have unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. The entire system is controlled by a global cooperative with local departments. Decisions on the development of the system are made by means of a collaborative platform that connects all stakeholders. These networks ensure that the questions are answered by the appropriate members. The more a specific decision influences the life of a member, the more weight is applied to his opinion. Every inhabitant of the earth has access to unlimited mobility for a low monthly fee. Whether you go from Amsterdam to Haarlem, or from Paris to Beijing, the cost is almost equal thanks to the extremely low energy consumption. Only acceleration and braking require energy, the rest of the trip is nearly energy neutral.

ET3 is a type of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) which is ready for production today and is the inspiration for this new network.

The same network can also serve as an energy storage. Because of the nearly energy-neutral character of the system, renewable energy can be stored as kinetic energy by speeding up the capsules.

ECN presented this principle of energy storage in 2015 in the form of an energy-train.

This network is the new main infrastructure. In addition, people will be free to move on bikes, e-bikes and electric vehicles using the open and above-ground infrastructure. The amount of roads will be drastically reduced given that fact that all transported goods and most of the necessary displacements of people will be handled in the new network. What remains is a city where there is no more need for parking and with very little infrastructure. A city where public space is used for high-quality life. A city where the predominant sounds and smells of traffic finally belong to the past. A city where children can play almost everywhere without danger.

This vision is based on a fully automated network of vehicles in a world where these vehicles are no longer personal possessions but belong to the global commons.

The transition

The rollout of the ETT system

Before city residents are willing to get into a vehicle, this system needs to be tested extensively. In addition, it is difficult to imagine that we can immediately start with construction in the city. The first step in the transition to a new transport system can consist of providing an alternative for the flow of goods and waste at a regional level. Before the network is rolled out, overburdened connections can be relieved at a regional scale. For instance, we can consider the port of Rotterdam and a connection between Schiphol and Aalsmeer. Given the dimensions of the system it is relatively simple to build an addition next to motorways.

When the technical and economic feasibility has been proven, work can start on the construction in urban areas to slowly connect each address.

Autonomous vehicles

As a precursor to a fully automated transport system in a closed and controlled environment, the transition to autonomous vehicles can take place on our existing infrastructure. Specific lanes on our highways can quite simply accommodate autonomous trucks and cars. The development of new, smaller autonomous vehicles can increase the capacity of our existing infrastructure tremendously. When we consider how much empty space is being transported in our current vehicles there is an enormous potential for improvement. We can also imagine small couplable vehicles that can take any size that is needed. Prototypes are currently being developed.

 animation: NEXT Future Transportation

What is the result of the above developments? What can a city like Amsterdam look like when we use autonomous vehicles and e-bikes on a large scale? This is the question we asked with THNK School for Creative Leadership in 2016 for un Urban Mobility Lab commissioned by the municipality of Amsterdam based on the results of a workshop during which we have defined an ideal situation with the participants. The starting point was a new network of e-bike highways and specific corridors for autonomous vehicles.

These autonomous vehicles can also be manually controlled which could lead to new forms of public transport. For each trip from someones front door to the autonomous lanes drivers can be used. The driver can then get off at the autonomous hub and the trip is continued autonomously in the vehicle until it needs to be driven again by a human being. The next driver gets in and brings the passenger to where he or she needs to go. In short, a door-to-door solution of public transport for the city. Car ownership has become useless in cities hence rendering all parking spots unnecessary. Besides autonomous vehicles some intensively used and efficient metro and tram lines in the city will remain operational. Based on the above assumptions, we have redesigned three nodes in Amsterdam. The principles and designs have been created with the help of a traffic consultant.

On this site you can see “before” and “after” images of the nodes:

Ownership to access

Before the above features are fully available, we will have to rely on our current transport systems. Currently we have an enormous fleet for our car mobility. Most people have their own car, often even several cars. Studies show that to respond to our car mobility needs we can use far fewer cars. Cars sit idle most of the time. Even at the peak moments during the day we only use a small part of our fleet. As Jeremy Rifkin writes in “Zero Marginal Cost Society,” “Incredibly, Burns (the corporate vice president of research, development, and planning at General Motors until 2009 and Currently professor of engineering at the University of Michigan) Admits that” about 80% Fewer shared, coordinated vehicles would be needed than Personally owned vehicles providence to the same level of mobility, with less investment “. The first step on the road to utopia is therefore to implement on a much larger scale the concept of car sharing. This requires new forms of cooperation that we are currently developing in The Hague. To promote the use of “commoning” to manage our streets, we created an animation to show the potential of car sharing in a street in The Hague.

To show the effect of behavioural change in one or more blocks, a partnership is needed with the municipality and some other local commonors. We are working on a process in which people are encouraged to park their cars elsewhere (temporarily) and start sharing car. The group of shared cars is composed by the residents themselves. The amount and different type of cars dependent on the usage profiles of the participants. Initially, this takes the form of a pilot. During this pilot participants will save money (the car will be parked elsewhere allowing them to save money on insurance and taxes) and can experience what it is like to use a group of shared cars. In addition, the vacant parking spaces will be used for other functions. The design for the public space liberated with the disappearance of a large amount of cars will be made in a collaborative way by the residents and the city, based on some sort of menu provided by the urban designers of the city. This to ensure that the proposals made by the residents are realistic and thus realisable. If this experiment pleases the participants, they can choose to make this situation permanent.

The cars are owned by the Mobility Cooperative. The cooperative has local teams that manage their own fleet of cars. The cooperative platform ensures that you can use mobility solutions owned by the cooperative throughout the whole city. The mobility fleet can consist of e-bikes, transport bikes, cars, vans, and so on. You can also image a large amount of services that can be added to the platform like ride-sharing, pick-up and drop-off services, grocery pick-up and so on. All these services can be “payed” in mobility minutes meaning that every time you help someone out with his or her mobility needs, you get the opportunity to consume mobility when you need to.

This is the predecessor of the global cooperation we want to use to connect the entire world. Due to the cooperative nature of this solution it offers the highest quality for the lowest price.

Conclusion

The transition to MaaC requires vision and design skills. I have tried to put a project out there and hope other thinkers and designers get inspired to work further on this and, by all means, criticise the above proposition. In 2017 we will develop a cooperative platform that will be the start of the transition. This platform will start in The Hague but needs affiliates in other cities. To have the impact we need to have it is imperative that mobility experts unite and start collaborating with the inhabitants of the cities instead of with the politically motivated organisations they tend to work with today. Get on board and let’s start working on Mobility as a Commons.

The post MaaC: Mobility as a Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Technology is disrupting outmoded industries at an unprecedented rate. As the gyroscopic effects of the neoliberal model wobble out of control Paul Mason suggests the end of capitalism has begun and even the IMF is questioning whether their capitalist agenda was a 30 year long mistake. This article analyses how platform businesses disrupt industries and suggests how emerging technologies and ownership models are ushering in a fundamentally new, truly democratic economy.

The rise of disruptive platforms

Uber has become the most valuable startup ever and has completely disrupted the taxi industry in every country it has targeted. Similarly, Airbnb has disrupted the hotel and bed and breakfast markets, making massive profits by syphoning fees from customers and suppliers without producing any tangible goods or owning any physical infrastructure. So what are the key ingredients of their successes?

To disrupt an industry you can’t just launch an app, you have to remove pain, improve service or simply better the traditional process of transaction and both Uber and Airbnb have done this in spades. Uber have not only improved the traditional cab booking process but have relocated the payment process from the physical to the digital world. Gone are the days of struggling to find a local cab number, wondering if or when it’ll ever arrive and then fumbling to find the right change whilst you manhandle your luggage. With an Uber you just say thanks and walk away.

Similarly, renting a flat or a room was always tarnished by the payment process. No matter how much people trust others there’s something ‘dirty’ about asking people to pay you. With Airbnb payment happens upfront online so your host can simply drop their keys in your hand confident in the knowledge that payment has already been made.

People like simplicity. These new, disruptive startups have simplified peoples’ lives by utilising technology, which has helped them grow exponentially.

So disruption works. And works particularly well when the target industry is well established, but a bit ‘stuffy’. A bit ‘long in the tooth’ and populated by people that won’t realise what’s going on until it’s too late; by the time the new solution is well on it’s way to usurping the old.

Which makes me think of Whitehall.

Where else can you find such a superb group of ‘stuffy’, old fashioned, single-minded capitalists, who are a bit ‘long in the tooth’? Where else can you find an ‘industry’ that is operating on completely outmoded, outdated and outrageously ineffective processes that would benefit from a little disruption?

Capitalism has subsumed democracy and made it an industry

We don’t really live in a democracy. People argue that we do, but there’s no way it can be true. If we lived in a democracy, we would have a say in at least some of the decisions by which we are affected. But we don’t, not really, not like we should in a democratic society. No matter how hard I try. No matter how much I get involved. No matter how many times I write to my MP, or tweet at him, my opinion does not make any difference to the harsh reality on the ground. The social paradigm we live in is dominated by the interests of big business. Capitalism has subsumed democracy.

Let me give you an example. How, in a democracy, would something like TTIP be possible? For those of you that have been living under a rock for the last two years, TTIP is the best example of rapacious neoliberalism doing its best to gain even more power over the entire planet. The idea is to further empower giant corporates by letting them sue national governments for loss of profits caused by changes in legislation. The fact that this “idea”, which will affect everyone since it aims to gain the power to overthrow any environmental legislation which stands in the way of “free trade”, is being debated behind closed doors by the global elite, illustrates how undemocratic things have become. What happened to our vote? What happened to the voices of the millions and billions of people this legislation will affect? The people’s voices are not welcome in a debate ‘owned’ by big business.

To illustrate how far we have come down this road, let’s look at how big business plays dirty. Big business will use any means at its disposal to get what it wants and lobbying is one of its favourite tools. Neal Gorenflo describes how “death star platforms” like Uber and AirBnb combine lobbying with other influencing strategies to bend the market to their will:

Uber’s David Plouffe, formerly President Obama’s campaign manager, literally besieged Portland’s mayor, ultimately forcing him to create a favorable policy. Bloomberg’s “This is How Uber Takes Over a City” gives an eye opening account Uber’s strong arm tactics. As of this writing this, Airbnb is running an $8.3 million campaign to defeat a San Francisco voter proposition (Prop F) designed to limit Airbnb’s negative impact on the city’s skyrocketing housing costs. This lobbying activity is just the tip of the iceberg. Uber and Airbnb are using a good bit of their $10 billion+ collective war chest to hire a global army of lobbyists. In their language, they’ve put “boots on the ground in hundreds of cities.

The modern world of unfettered neoliberal capitalism is a far cry from the village market that once was… Gorenflo describes the new wave of “professionals” applying their collective aptitude to creating startups as “shock and awe entrepreneurship” in which the rules are being bent, broken and re-written for capitalism’s own benefit!

It’s like 1+1=10. The more money Death Star platforms raise, the more press and customers they get. The more they break the rules, the more press and customers they get, which enables them to raise even more money. Taxi drivers strike? Jackpot! And the cycle repeats. It’s a blitzkrieg. It’s shock and awe entrepreneurship. It’s the sound of a new hegemonic bloc coming to power.

Democracy may not be a traditional ‘industry’, but with campaign contributions at record highs, it’s more like one now than ever before. Democracy as it was and should still be defined, is no longer working as it was supposed to. It is no longer “government of the people, by the people, for the people” it’s more like “government of the people, by the elites, for big business”, with a token ‘vote’ to placate the electorate once every five years, and that is something we can disrupt.

How can we disrupt capitalist democracy?

As we have seen from the Uber and AirBnb examples, successful disruption requires fundamental changes to both the underlying agreements (the T&Cs you don’t read but agree to before using their platforms) and the processes and transactions (what you can do on the app and what happens in the physical world) of an industry.

Our entire economy, in fact the very concept of money itself, is nothing more than an agreement. The words “I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…” which are still printed on UK Pounds Sterling encapsulate the basic “agreement” upon which our entire economy is based. Don’t get me started about how banks have run away with that idea but the basic point remains: money is an agreement. If we want a new monetary system we need to found new forms of agreement like Bitcoin, for example.

Similarly, companies are founded on agreements and, since 1976, Public Limited Companies’ agreements include a key objective to ‘maximise profits for shareholders’, which is the main problem with that agreement. It is one cause of the corporate psychosis which manifests as environmental destruction and exploitation whilst driving up inequality.

To disrupt capitalist democracy we need to create new agreements which usurp the present economic and business ownership models AND improve the processes by which ‘the people’ interact with these systems, to make them more attractive, more responsive and more user friendly than what’s on offer today.

When people can obtain the majority of goods or services they need from democratically owned and managed organisations, through decentralised crypto-currencies or other means, more easily than they can through the present system, capitalism will become a thing of the past. Enter the co-operative and it’s digital big brother, the platform co-op.

What’s a platform co-op?

Co-ops are organisations based on the well established Rochdale principles, which are by their very nature open, inclusive and democratically controlled by their members. They can take many forms, and be set up in different ways but the one essential feature that distinguishes them completely from ‘normal’ companies is the member-owned governance structure. Multi-stakeholder co-ops can be structured to be governed by various groups of stakeholders, ensuring that everyone who has a relationship with the organisation (for example, workers, customers, suppliers and investors) has a genuine say in how the organisation operates.

Platform co-ops are online organisations, normally involving a virtual market or meeting place which, just like co-ops, are owned and managed by their members.

Co-ops are not particularly revolutionary, they’ve been around since the 1800s, but what is new is the interest in the co-operative model and how it can be applied to online platforms. We’ve seen how well open source software has usurped proprietary alternatives and now the platform co-op model, which is itself open-source, is spawning a range of new, online, member owned and democratically controlled organisations who aim to usurp the corporate ‘Death Star’ platforms.

How can platform co-ops disrupt capitalist democracy?

The key word here is “ownership”. As Marjorie Kelly points out in Owning our future “Ownership is the gravitational field that holds our economy in orbit”. Traditional, extractive, publicly traded organisations represent 80% of global industrial output, but are controlled by the wealthiest 10% of society. The elite own the organisations which make up our economy and this setup allows them to extract wealth from us to them by design.

Platform co-ops on the other hand, which must always be democratically owned, are the building blocks of an ownership revolution in which power is transferred from the few to the many. Platform co-ops have a natural source of funding through the crowds which make up their networks, they are generative by design, incorporating shared values. Their purpose is to benefit their communities.

All members get a say in how platform co-ops are run and therefore, the things the co-ops do which affect them. Imagine that your local school, shop and pub or restaurant are all co-ops and you own part of each of them. You would be able to influence the things that affect your daily life in ways that are currently impossible through our existing ‘democracy’. You wouldn’t need to write to your MP in the vague hopes that you would get a reply. You would be able to propose ideas, debate others’ ideas and vote directly on matters that concerned you, making real changes in your local community and to your quality of life.

Co-ops also encourage the development of commons, by transferring knowledge from private to public ownership. Look at how Wikipedia has killed Encyclopaedia Britannica and how WikiHouse has enabled open source housing, or how WikiSpeed is working towards producing open source cars. These changes are fundamental to the structure of our economy, knowledge can never be re-appropriated into private hands once it is open source. This is the first element of a commons-based economy, the mutualisation of knowledge and ideas.

Only by redesigning the ownership models of the organisations we buy from, work for and rely upon we will start to disrupt the traditional capitalist model. As Mason notes:

The logical focus for supporters of postcapitalism is to build alternatives within the system; to use governmental power in a radical and disruptive way; and to direct all actions towards the transition – not the defence of random elements of the old system. We have to learn what’s urgent, and what’s important…

Changing ownership models alone will not be enough

As with the Uber and Airbnb examples, disruption requires a combination of new agreements and changes to the processes and transactions of an industry. The co-operative ownership model presents a viable alternative to the ‘agreements’ on which the majority of businesses are founded, but new agreements alone will not disrupt much. To truly disrupt an industry, especially one as complex and insidious at capitalist democracy, we also need to change how business is conducted, to make the co-op model the default instead of the exception.

For disruption to really work, founding and running co-ops has got to become much easier. Technology can and is being applied but there’s still much work to be done to deliver an Uber-esque experience which encourages the swarm to defect from limited companies and make co-ops the prevalent organisational form.

Out-evolving such a well established system is not going to be easy and such a multitude of challenges require numerous technical innovations. Enter “the open app ecosystem”, a suite of interoperable open source apps designed to facilitate distributed collaboration. The open app ecosystem does not exist entirely yet, but Sandstorm is a good example of current progress and several of the other apps required to run cooperative organisations online already exist elsewhere. Take Loomio for example, the decision making app developed by Enspiral, a co-op from New Zealand, which lets hundreds and thousands of people make collective decisions collaboratively online through a simple web based interface. It’s just one of a suite of apps which we need to run platform co-ops. Combine Loomio with similarly ‘open’ project management software, task management, accounting and fundraising software, websites, shopping carts, and donation systems and the process of running a co-op would be much more Uber-esque. But it still won’t disrupt the norm.

Loomio for voting on decisions.

For co-ops and platform co-ops to become ubiquitous, and the default model for startups worldwide, we need to strip out the bureaucracy and legal barriers and make founding co-ops as easy as catching a cab. The biggest barrier to the formation of collaborative partnerships is nearly always the agreement process. How many times have you seen a good idea between friends, or between small businesses, develop only to see the potential collaboration stall at the ‘partnership agreement’, or ‘joint venture’ agreement stage? We need a process for converting new ideas into real collaborative projects which explicitly avoids ownership issues and allocation of profits, which tend to be the biggest barriers to co-operation. For this to work we need to combine the idea behind One Click Co-ops, with a range of versatile, off-the-peg, and easily understandable organisational options. Ultimately, there are only a few models for sharing profits; by splitting them between stakeholders, according to time and/or resources invested, so cookie-cutter models should work for most new organisations in the first instance. Open value Networks present another viable model for profit sharing in which a ‘value accounting system’ computes equity in proportion to contributions automatically, removing the pain from the profit sharing process.

To disrupt capitalist democracy, founding and running a co-op needs to be as easy as:

1. Logging on to a web service or app and defining who your stakeholder groups and founding members will be

2. Defining if you will want to make profits, raise share capital or perform other financial transactions

3. Picking a model from suggested ‘cookie-cutter’ legal forms, depending on your location and objectives

4. Naming your organisation

5. Picking your required web apps from the Open App Ecosystem

6. Customising and setting up your apps (website, fundraising / payment, project / task / people management / decision making / rewards systems etc) to enable your new organisation

The above process should probably be free too. The above might seem like a fanciful wish list but, with a concerted effort from the open source community, and/or a suitable sponsor, it could probably be delivered a lot quicker than we imagine.

The vision

So, say we have the tech, which enables us to found and run new organisations based on new agreements, how is this really going to disrupt capitalist democracy? There are a few simple elements to this vision, which platform co-ops create.

Decentralised distributed currencies (much like the internal currencies used by multi-nationals to transfer funds between companies and across borders to avoid paying duties and taxes) will change the way our economy works by re-routing flows of capital. For example, if I could earn “co-op coins” in one co-op and spend them in the next, as a co-op member I would be incentivised to do so, since I also receive a share of the profits.

The creation of commons will encourage the shift from scarcity to abundance. Access to information is becoming cheaper, if not free, which is changing the nature of our society, but platform co-ops also enable the development of material (shared ‘stuff’) and economic commons (shared ‘access to finance’). For example, if trade in co-op coins was taxed (at a democratically agreed rate) to form a ‘commons fund’ to which co-op members could apply, we would have a democratically controlled source of funding for new co-operative service.

Liquid democracy will change how communities are governed, from the local to the global.

Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops would provide an alternative system of governance. Imagine having the option to vote, digitally, on what you liked when you liked according to the voting schedule of the co-ops of which you are a member. This would create a radically different community of interaction and feedback to the ‘one vote every five years’ idea of ‘democracy’ we have today. If you don’t like voting, don’t have time or don’t know about the issue/s, no problem, just delegate your vote to someone else you trust or to someone else who has a good reputation on the subject which is being debated.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. If organisations like this existed it is hard to imagine why we would need our current ‘representatives’ and if it was easier to have, and see the result of, your say by voting through the co-operative system why would we need the existing system at all?

To top it off, co-ops are not driven by the extractive, profit making motive, making them less prone to boom and bust. Instead they are normally designed to benefit communities with the long term objectives of sustaining life and increasing well-being through the emerging values of sustainability and fairness which allow life to flourish.

This vision is the simple application of existing technology to an outdated industry which is ripe for disruption. But the only way it will happen is if we the people stop arguing, complaining and campaigning against the present system and get on with designing and building the technology, the agreements, the processes and the ownership models of the generative economy in a concerted and collaborative way.

To stay up to date with the latest news about platform cooperatives and the new collaborative sustainable economy follow @open_coop and join the mailing list (form in the right hand column) and buy your tickets now.

Cross-posted from The Open Coop
Featured image courtesy of encyclopediadramatica.se

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