GT’s model is an extensive overhaul of an orphaned open source governance protocol ^[1], which we have been substantially overhauled to better fit our needs. The adapted model explicitly incorporates the key practices of Open Cooperativism (a method combining the ideas of the Commons and Free Culture with the social tradition of the cooperative movement), Contributive Accounting (a form of accounting where contributions to a shared project are logged to ensure fair distributions of income and livelihoods) and, uniquely in this space, feminist economics and care work as essential elements ^[2].

After years of discussing the model, we decided to collectively reimagine it by convening a group of experts on decentralised/non-hierarchical organizations, facilitation, peer governance, distributed tech and mutualized finance. We called this process “Guerrilla Translation Reloaded“, which culminated in a new version of the model: The Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance and Economic Model (currently at version 2.0)

The full model can be read in the link above, but this article takes a narrative approach to answer two very simple questions: what is the model’s logic, and how does it work?

The best way to understand it may seem counterintuitive at first. If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective. These correspond to tracked “pro bono” (commons-oriented voluntary work chosen by the translators) and “livelihood” (paid) work, as well as reproductive or care work. Shares in these three types of work determine how much is paid on a monthly basis. Where does the money to pay shares come from, and how are they paid? From the productive work performed by the worker-owners — in GT’s case, that work is written and simultaneous translation, copyediting, subtitling, and related services. We will explain the “how” below.

In short, the more effort and care put into the collective, the larger the share. This is not a competitive, game-theory influenced scheme; it’s a solidarity based strategy for economic resistance that allows all members to contribute according to their capacity. All members create value; part of this value is processed through a market interface (the agency) and is converted into monetary value, which is then pooled and distributed to benefit all value streams. We call this value sovereignty. And, although the default decision making protocol is virtually identical to a traditional coop’s “one member, one vote” principle, your shares can influence decision making in critical situations, such as blocked proposal.

How is this type of share-holding a contrast to that found in a corporation? Let’s break down the differences. While shareholders in a corporation accrue power through money, in our model, power is treated differently. The descriptions are power-to and power-with, accrued via productive and reproductive work taken for the health of the collective and the Commons. A corporation (or a start-up, or any capitalist business) employs wage labor to produce profit-maximizing commodities though privately owned and managed productive infrastructures. By contrast, in an Open Coop, we work together for social and environmental purposes while also creating commons and building community, locally and/or globally. The model allows us to turn our talents to worthwhile, not dead-end, causes. This is how we are practicing economic resistance.

The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: How does it work?

We have established that Guerrilla Translators perform two types of productive work: pro-bono and paid (more about reproductive or care work later). If we take written translation as an example, both types are essentially identical. They are performed by the same team, using the same methods, working collectively, and sharing both the work and the eventual rewards. So, what are the differences?

Pro-bono translations are the ones we choose to do ourselves, based on our enthusiasm for the original material and well aligned with our values. This doesn’t make us unpaid volunteers, though. It all boils down to the way we choose to distribute value. To us, a pro-bono or a paid translation has the same value – literally. We assign a (cost) value for all work we do, whether it’s a self-selected pro-bono piece for publication on our blog, or work contracted by a client. Our model of income distribution diverts a portion of every paid/contracted job towards fulfilling the value of the pro-bono work shares accrued by our members. This has several functions. First, it allows all members of the collective to gain an amount of income from their productive work, whether it was pro-bono or paid. Second, collective members are not put into competition among themselves for paid work, nor for the “best” paid work (based on the per-word rate). All work is valued internally at the same rate, regardless of the external prices which are variable.

We have several pricing tiers for our clients. Metaphorically, there’s a pay-it-forward spirit involved here on the client side, but it’s more like pay-it-backward-and-forward internally in the collective. Clients with the greatest financial means who are aligned with our principles and wish to provide support for our knowledge commons are offered the top tier rate – this is still quite competitive, in fact at the lower end of typical translation pricing. There will be a penny or two per word that these clients are directly donating to our pro-bono shares and also towards any contract jobs we accept for clients with minimal or bare-bones budgets (including small co-ops, activist collectives, non-VC startups, and others). This sliding scale helps us nurture relationships and help support collectives and initiatives with the least financial means so it is fair for everyone.

The soft stuff is the hard stuff: the importance of a care work

So far, we have mainly spoken about productive, tangible work: translations, editing, formatting. These tasks are mostly word-based and therefore, easy to quantify and assign credits. But what about everything that leads, directly or indirectly, to paid work? Searching for clients, project management, quality control, relationship and trust building, etc. – all the invisible work that goes into keeping afloat? This is reproductive work, or care work.

In GT. we distinguish between two types of care work: that for the health of the collective, and that for the living beings within.

When talking about caring for the health of the collective, we conceive it as a living entity or system, even a commons. The emergent values of this system are encoded in the governance model and embodied by the collective’s practices and legal-technical structures ^[3]. To maintain a healthy collective we choose to honour our collective agreements, maintain our communication rhythms, and distribute the care work needed to make the collective thrive. Other ways to care for the health of the collective include coop and business development, seeking and attending to clients, making sure our financials are up to date and everything is paid, maintaining active relationships with authors, publishers, following through on our commitments… everything that you’d consider as “admin” work in a traditional agency or co-op, and on top of that, everything else that’s easily forgotten if you’re not doing it yourself. It’s literally invisible work to those who don’t acknowledge it, and work that many feel unjustifiably obligated to take on.

The difference is that in Guerrilla Translation, these activities aren’t assigned to set roles. Instead, all “caring for the health of the collective” aka care work items are modular, easily visualized, and can be picked up by any collective member. In fact, those members may belong to one or more work circles, which steward certain areas, such as community, sustainability, networking, training, tech, etc.

Additionally, when we speak about care work for the living beings who make the collective, we refer to the individual Guerrilla Translators who mutually build trust and intimacy to care for and support each other. Our cooperative practices should never be solely dependent on technology or protocols, including the governance model. These are only tools to facilitate and strengthen our collaborative culture.

We believe that cooperative cohesion is primarily based on healthy, consent-based heterarchical relationships. To foster these we have committed to certain regular practices, such as mentoring — where we practice and document peer learning in the collective’s tools and practices — and mutual support — where we look after each other and care for our mutual well-being, attuned to everyone’s moods, needs and larger realities beyond the collective.

Every member, whether in training or longstanding, is supported by a specific person who has their back. Every member has someone else’s back. Supported members have a safe space to express themselves to be cared for and heard within the collective. In this relationship, they may also be reminded of their commitments, etc. Conflict resolution is handled through the mutual support system, ensuring the distribution of personal care work. This has been a very basic overview of the model’s structural (credits and shares) and cultural (care work) qualities. If it raises more questions than it answers, or if you’re simply curious, you can read the full model. In the following sections, we will visualize the ways in which the model can work.

What this looks like in practice

Meet “Jill”, a Guerrilla Translator. Today she’s got a little bit of a time and has chosen an article to be translated. Maybe she proposed it, or maybe she picked it up from an existing list of material waiting to be translated. She contacts the author to let her know that GT would like to translate and publish the article, and asks for any required permission if necessary, etc.

This describes a pro-bono translation. Jill will work alongside “María”, a copyeditor, and “Deb”, who’ll take care of the web formatting and social media promotion of the article.

The article is 1000 words long. This wordcount is processed through GT’s internal credits protocol, with this pro-bono translation valued at 0,16 credits per word. Once completed, 160 Love credits will be created. This is how they are split:

• 80 for the translation (Jill)
• 40 for the copyediting/proofreading (María)
• 10 for pre production (Jill, as she chose the article and contacted the author)
• 20 for formatting (Deb)
• 10 for post production (Deb, as she will be promoting the translation doing social media, etc) ^[4]

Let’s imagine that this is the first time that Jill, Maria and Deb have done a pro-bono project for GT. Once the project is accounted for, their respective pro-bono shares will look like this:

• Jill has accrued 90 Love Credits
• María has accrued 40 Love Credits
• Deb has accrued 30 Love Credits

A week passes, and an author or client wants to contract GT to translate an article. This is called livelihood work. The material is chosen by the client (obviously), and the deadline negotiated with the collective. Coincidentally, the text to be translated is also 1000 words long (amazing how our examples are identical!). GT’s agency side uses a sliding scale for prices. This client is a small, open source-oriented NGO, so the price is quoted at 0,12 € per word. The team will be Jill as the translator and María as the editor. Note that unlike the pro-bono translation above, there is no web formatting to be done. Once the translation is completed, the client owes GT 120 €, but this money will not be paid directly to Jill and María as income. This money will be held until the end of the month in a digital trust dedicated to maintaining health of the collective. Meanwhile, once the translation is complete and sent to the client, Jill and Maria will have accrued the following Livelihood Credits:

• Jill has accrued 80 Livelihood Credits
• María has accrued 40 Livelihood Credits

For the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that these are the only pro bono and agency translations undertaken in the history of the collective. Now it’s getting toward the end of the month and the Guerilla Translators are ready to distribute! There are exactly 120 euros in the bank account ^[5]. This is how they will be distributed:

• 75% of the funds will fulfill Livelihood credit shares
• 25% will fulfill Pro-bono credit shares

These percentages have been chosen to balance the time needed for paid work while not forgetting to set aside some time for the vital pro-bono side. Now, we will divest those 120 € within the trust and into two “streams”:

• The Livelihood Stream receives a total of 90,00 €
• The Love Stream receives a total of 30,00 €

This is now divided among the member’s shares in the following way:

Livelihood Stream: Jill holds 67% of the “shares” (80 credits of 120 total), while María has 33% (40 credits of a 120 total). So out of 88,80 € allocated for the Livelihood Stream, Jill will receive 60,30 €. María receives 29,70 €.

Love Stream: Jill holds 56% of the shares (90 credits of 160 total). María has 25% (40 out of 160) and Deb has 19% (30 out of 160). So, out of 30 € allocated for the Love Stream, Jill will receive 16,80 €, María 7,50 € and Deb 5,70 €.

Totalled up, this is the money that gets paid to the three active members:

• Jill receives 77,10 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• María receives 37,20 € (her Livelihood and Love work combined)
• Deb receives 5,70 € (Just Love work, as Deb hasn’t performed any livelihood work this month)

This totals 120 €. Magic!

One example among many

This is one situation. During another month, María may have done much more editing work, which takes less time than translation. Deb may have done more care work (more on that later) in both the Love and Livelihood streams. New people may have come in, maybe there’s been a windfall! The model can account for all these and other possibilities while also being dynamic in changing circumstances. It’s a “Team Human” model where the technology is kept flexible, and updates to serve the qualitative experiences of the collective, not just the measurable ones.

The secret life of Livelihood, Love and the ways of measuring credits

As you may have noticed, if 1 love credit equals 1 euro, in the example above we’ve only paid down 30 Love credits (25% of distributed funds) in euros. As 160 Love credits were created with the pro-bono translation, this still leaves 130 which haven’t been paid in money.

The credits that have been converted into money and transferred to individual’s accounts are called Divested credits, ie: they’ve been paid down. The unpaid credits are considered Invested credits: active credits that have yet to be paid. If you think about it, on a month by month basis 75% of Love credits will be “invested” rather than divested/paid. In essence, the coop has an ongoing debt with its own pro-bono/Love stream which will be paid back on a rolling basis. ^[6]

The same situation is also applicable to Livelihood credits. As 75% of earned credits are divested, 25% will remain invested. Both types of credits (Love and Livelihood) can be divested or invested. Meanwhile, the sum of both are considered Historical credits.

“Why so many? So confusing!” Yeah okay, but complexity allows for dynamism, nuance and catering for the different life circumstances and preferences of Guerrilla Translators. Reality is complex, and we want this to work in many real situations.

For now, it’s important to make clear that the total amount of historical credits you have accrued reflect your investment in the organization. Whether it’s productive or reproductive work, it all gets tracked: this informs our governance.

While in typical daily situations, all Guerrilla Translators have what amounts to “one member one vote” rights, historical credits come into play when making critical decisions such as blocked discussions, large structural changes to the governance model, and legal structure changes. In these rare yet important situations, votes can be weighed against an individual’s historical credits.

Meanwhile, the invested/divested ratio helps clarify which members are prioritized for Livelihood work. Given that livelihood work gets divested at a 75% higher rate than Love work, we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to perform it, and that incoming work is offered to those with a higher invested ration first. Similarly, when measuring care work the invested/divested ratios helps clarify when individuals may be benefitting monetarily in lieu of caring for the collective (and its members). In these cases, the ratio is used to determine whether to divest less and agree to a renewed commitment to care work.

In essence, care work is measured in hours, not credits, but it is only entrusted to members who have already gone through a 9-month “dating” phase before becoming fully committed members. All care work hours are instantly turned into historical credits. The Governance Model also describes two scenarios for care work hours: one in which these are paid from an seed-funding pool and a second when once the Open Coop is stable, it is entirely demonetised, with members committing to a set amount of hours each month and adjusting accordingly when there are any discrepancies. ^[7]

Why have we chosen this model?

Imagine that María is single mother with two kids to take care of. She wants to do socially useful work, but her material realities don’t allow her that privilege. By working with Guerrilla Translation she a) can perform paid/livelihood work for causes that matter and b) will not “lose” income by doing pro-bono work – ie, translations that would not otherwise get funded, but which should still be translated.

In fact, she could spend most of her time just doing paid/livelihood work, and it would still benefit the pro-bono/love side (and vice versa). The model addresses the possibility of internal competition for “paid work” overshadowing the social/activist mission of the collective. In short, contributing to the Commons also makes your livelihood more resilient. In turn, you make the Commons more resilient by creating new commons and facilitating communications. The same can be said about care work. The more you demonstrate care for the collective, the more resilient and healthy it will be. If any member can’t contribute a similar proportion of care work as the rest, the member will simply have a proportional amount of their credits deducted and will be encouraged to compensate by committing to more care hours.

In summary, the model is designed to find an optimum balance between paid, pro bono and reproductive work, with equity and continued dialogue at the center.

And much, much more

Here we have touched on some of the characteristics of the model. The full version looks at every aspect in detail, including roles and responsibilities, onboarding and mentoring, the legal/technical backdrop, community rhythms, graduated sanctions, payment mechanics, decision making, and much more.

If you are interested in joining or collaborating with Guerrilla Translation, or are researching or writing about new forms of commons-oriented accounting (and accountability!), you are now much better prepared to grasp the model in its entirety:

Commons-Oriented Open Cooperative Governance Model V 2.0

Meanwhile, for easy reference we are providing below a summary of the model’s main featured and a list of the materials that influenced its creation.

Open Coop Governance Model TLDR

In short: Guerrilla Translators undertake both pro-bono and paid translation/editing work. These types of productive work are accounted for in internal credits (1 credit = 1 Euro), creating shares. Net funds held in GT’s account are then distributed on a monthly basis: 75% of these are used to pay down members’ agency (livelihood) shares. The remaining 25% is used to pay for pro bono (love) shares. Reproductive work is tallied in hours and distributed according to each members ratio of benefits vs. contributions.

Below is the protocol for the model’s main characteristics. These can be applied as a bare-bones formula for other commons-oriented service collectives. Hyperlinks direct to specific sections of the full governance model text or to the Guerrilla Media Collective Wiki.

• The Open Coop performs socially-oriented pro-bono and paid work.
• Pro-bono work creates relationships and social capital which (can) lead to paid work.
• Both forms of work are tallied into credits.
• Net earned income is distributed to fulfil members’ shares, allocated as: Paid (75%) and Pro-bono (25%).
• Client prices are on a sliding scale but members’ credits accrued are stable.
• Higher (client) prices lead to surpluses, used to accelerate pro-bono credit payment.
• There are three levels of participation: Casual/unpaid (commons-based peer production); Dating/partly paid (Commons/coop onboarding process); and Committed/paid (Commons and Coop full membership).
• Casual members have no responsibilities and Committed members review their work for inclusion, or not
• Dating members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work) during a nine month trial periodbefore mutual decisions are made about becoming Committed. They are peer mentored by the collective and continually evaluated.
• Committed members have ongoing responsibilities (pro-bono and care work), evaluated quarterly. Members unable to maintain these are downgraded from the Coop.
• Care and reproductive work is valued as highly as productive work. “Care” means caring for the health of the collective and also caring for its individual members.
• Care work is valued in time and entrusted selectively by committed members.
• Decision making is made by consent. Committed members’ votes are binding.
• Reproductive care work and productive pro-bono and paid work affect each member’s standing in the coop, as seen in their total credits over time.

Suggested Reading

First is a summary article of our GT Reloaded event, documenting the main discussions and takeaways from the encounter, where we picked apart and reimagined the governance model:

• Punk Elegance: How Guerrilla Translation reimagined itself for Open Cooperativism (article) “The future of the project seems really bright because of the clarity of vision. Doing meaningful social and political work for groups and projects isn’t just an afterthought. The determination to build that into the org structure speaks volumes to the wisdom of the group: that investment of time is powerful, that translators and editors should be able to openly do passion work, following their hearts together, and that collective prioritization teaches everyone involved, and nurtures and hones shared values.” See also the Guerrilla Translation Reloaded Full Workshop Report for a more detailed account.

Following is a list of articles, papers, videos on things that have influenced our governance model and general philosophy. They also explore some of the tensions we have tried to reconcile: between metrics and the immeasurable, system design and lived experience, and productive and reproductive work.

• Patterns for Decentralised Governance and why Blockchain Doesn’t Decentralise Power… Unless You Design It To (Video and article) “There is a lot of anticipation for how blockchain and other decentralising technologies are going to drastically reshape society, but do they address power? “If you take a step back from the technology, if you look at the challenges we face in wider society, and you look at the history of social change, if you step back and just consider for a minute: “how can we decentralise power?”, then “build a better database” feels like a pretty weak answer. To me, it seems obvious that some of the most urgent power imbalances fall on gender, race, and class lines.”
• Patterns for Decentralised Organising (e-book) “I’m not so interested in what you’re working on together, I’m just going to focus on how you do it. To my way of thinking, it doesn’t matter if you’re trying to build a better electric vehicle, or develop government policy, or blockade a pipeline; whenever you work with a group of people on a shared objective, there’s some stuff you’re going to deal with, some challenges. How do we decide what we’re working on? who does what? who can join our team? what are our expectations for each other? what happens when someone doesn’t fulfill those expectations? what do we do with disagreement? how do decisions get made?” ^[8]
• The Financialization of Life (article). “Do we want everything in life to be a transaction, as the market totalitarians propose? Or do we want to be citizen-commoners, co-creating shared value in freely associating communities? These differences matter, and Salvatore Iaconesi has written a brilliant analysis of the potential dangers of uncritically applying the blockchain to human life.”
• Re-imagining Value: Insights from the Care Economy, Commons, Cyberspace and Nature (booklet). “What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. This report explains that how we define value says a lot about what we care about and how we make sense of things — and the political agendas we pursue.”
• There is an alternative: participatory economics (interview) In this interview, Michael Albert — co-founder of Znet — reflects on the vision of participatory economics, and how it could take us beyond capitalism. “For the Occupy movements, and for other projects and movements which are rousing and continuing all around the world, to all together merge into a massive project that is truly oriented to engender a classless, feminist, inter-communalist, participatory future — I think their membership will have to be in command, not some elite at the helm. And I think those memberships will have to know the broad defining attributes of where they are trying to go, so they use tactics and strategies consistent with getting there.”
• From Platform to Open Cooperativism (article) “Two cooperative movements are important in this discussion: Platform Cooperativism, and Open Cooperativism. One may be more publicly visible right now, but they have much in common. These movements marry the power of digital networks with the rich history of the cooperative movement. How do these approaches compare? Are they redundant, complementary, mutually exclusive? What exact problems do they solve, and what outcome do they seek? In this article, we explain their origins and characteristics, and see how the actions proposed by these movements can work together, helping us form resilient livelihoods in our networked age.”
• Why do we need a contribution accounting system? (article) “With the advent of the Internet and the development of new digital technologies, the economy is following a trend of decentralization. The most innovative environments are open source communities and peer production is on the rise. The crowd innovates and produces. But the crowd is organized in loose networks, it is geographically dispersed, and contributions to projects follow a long tail distribution. What are the possible reward mechanisms in this new economy?”
• Blockchain technology : toward a decentralized governance of digital platforms? (academic paper) “In the same way, blockchain technology has enabled the emergence of new projects and initiatives designed around to the principles of decentralization and disintermediation, providing a new platform for large-scale experimentation in the design of new economic and organisational structures. Yet, to be really transformative, these initiatives need to transcend the current models of protocol-based governance and game-theoretical incentives, which can easily be co-opted by powerful actors, and come up with new governance models combining both on-chain and off-chain governance rules. The former can be used to support new mechanisms of regulation by code, novel incentivization schemes and a new sense of ownership over digital assets, whereas the latter are necessary to promote the vision, and facilitate the interaction of commons-based projects and initiatives with the existing legal and societal framework.”
• Holo: The evolution of cloud computing (article) “This is an attempt to communicate Holo in simple, clear language (with a bit of playfulness to keep it entertaining)” and A Futurist’s View on Holochain, The Evolution Of Blockchain, (video). An easy to understand video walk-through on Holo’s architecture and potential.
• Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be (article). “Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left —anarchism, mobility, and cooperation— even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups — applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.”

Footnotes

The post The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: an Overview appeared first on P2P Foundation.

With the advent of the Internet and the development of new digital technologies, the economy is following a trend of decentralization. The most innovative environments are open source communities and peer production is on the rise. The crowd innovates and produces. But the crowd is organized in loose networks, it is geographically dispersed, and contributions to projects follow a long tail distribution. What are the possible reward mechanisms in this new economy?

Our thesis is that in order to reward all the participants in p2p economic activity, and thus to incentivise contributions and make participation sustainable for everyone, we need to do contribution accounting: record everyone’s contribution, evaluate these contributions, and calculate every participant’s fair share. This method for redistribution of benefits must be established at the beginning of the economic process, in a transparent way. It constitutes a contract among participants, and it allows them to estimate their rewards in relation with their efforts. We call this the contribution accounting system.

For the rest of this article we will try to explain why a contribution accounting system is needed in a more decentralized economy, and unavoidable in a p2p economy.

Contribution accounting and exchanges

First, we need to make a distinction between a contribution accounting system and an exchange system. Suppose that we have 3 individuals picking using one basket. The contribution accounting system keeps track of how many cherries everyone puts in the basket, so that when they sell the basket on the market they can decide to redistribute the revenue in proportion to everyone’s contribution. It describes how contributions from multiple individuals amalgamate into a product, during a co-production processes.

Once a product is created, i.e. once the basket is full and ready to go to market, it can be exchanged using an exchange system: barter, currency, etc.

The contribution accounting system is not a currency, not a barter system. It doesn’t refer to an exchange between our 3 individuals who are picking cherries, or between them and another entity like a company. They are not getting paid a salary in exchange of their work. They are collaborating, they all add cherries into the same basket, which is their product to be. The exchange might occur at a later point in time, once their basket is full and ready to go to the market. Meanwhile, they all share the risk of having their cherries being eaten by birds, or of not getting a good price for their basket.

Production processes

A production process that requires more than one individual can be based on the following 3 arrangements, or on a combination of them:

• stigmergic coordination–  Participants don’t have aligned goals, don’t maintain a relationship other than being contributors to the same process. Ex. this is how Wikipedia is built. 
• cooperation – The goals of participants are not necessarily aligned. Ex. in a corporation employees and business owners usually have divergent interests and goals.
• collaboration – Requires a large degree of alignment in goals. Ex. a group of individuals climbing a mountain together.

The traditional capitalist economy is mostly about cooperation, which doesn’t require an tight alignment of interests and goals. Production is sustained through an exchange process, where workers exchange the time they spend on different tasks against wages. The exchange process transfers risk from workers to the owners of capital, but at the same time, the workers are stripped of their rights to the output of their labor. Workers cooperate (despite some inconveniences and misalignment in interests and goals) with the owners of capital in production processes because there exists an economic dependency between the two groups. Workers need money, which are by far the predominant means to acquire basic necessities. On the other side, the owners of capital need labor to generate more wealth. This economic dependency is not symmetrical and makes the system prone to abuse, which explains the existence (and necessity) of unions to counterbalance the tendency for exploitation.

In peer production we have a blend of the 3 arrangements mentioned above, mostly coordination and some stigmergic collaboration. In general, no one works for anyone else. Everyone involved is a peer, an affiliate of a peer production network. The p2p culture prescribes that the output of a collaborative and participatory process should not be owned or controlled by anyone in particular, but shared among participants in a fair way. Immaterial artifacts that are produced in such way (such as software or hardware designs) are usually released as commons (they are openly shared). Material goods can be exchanged on the market, and the revenue generated is shared among all the participants. Service-based models also exist, where services are exchanged on the market against some form of payment, which is redistributed to everyone involved in the providing the service. A good example of service-bases p2p model is the Bitcoin network. If we focus only on the mining aspect, minors form a open network of peer participants, they collectively maintain the hardware infrastructure of the entire network. Minors are rewarded in proportion to the computing power that they provide to the network.

The normal and the long tail modes of production

normal mode of production

In the traditional capitalist economy wages should be regulated by the free labor market, if we make abstraction of all sorts of mechanisms through which this market can be biased (labor unions and governmental intervention included). The market is responsible for the difference in salary between an engineer and a clerk. The notion of jobimplies that a salary is determined and agreed upon before the employee starts working (with the possibility modify the salary based on performance). Since the amount of $ per hours of work is pre-established, the capital owner needs to make sure that the employee produces enough during the work hours. Therefore, a new role is needed within the organization to guarantee this, the beloved project manager. Traditional organizations spend a lot of energy doing time management, because usually the interest of the worker is not perfectly aligned with the interest of the capital owner (see cooperative production above). Classical organizations operate on the normal mode of production (from the ”normal curve” or ”bell curve”), where the number of workers is minimized, and the majority of employees in a category of roles produce almost the same amount. Very few workers produce less than the norm, because they are eliminated (i.e. fired). Very few produce more, because there are no incentives to do so, the association with the mission of the traditional enterprise is weak, the sense of belonging is usually low (usually fabricated by the HR department), the sense of ownership is almost absent, etc.

long tail mode of production

The situation is very different in a peer production environment, which is open to participation, is decentralized in terms of allocation of resources, and uses a horizontal governance system.

In peer production, we see a log tail distribution of contributions, which means that a very large number of individuals are involved in production, only a very small percentage of those contribute a lot, the great majority of them contribute very little, and most of the production is done by those who make small contributions. A prearrangement on revenue is impossible in this context. First, because the production process is very dynamic and relations of production cannot be contract-based. Second, the process involves a great number of individuals that are distributed all over the planet, therefore it is impossible to do time management. Moreover, no one can force anyone else to work more. In this mode of production we need to evaluate rewards after the fact, based on deliverables or based on the type of activity and its potential to increase the probability of production of valuable products. A system is needed to account for everyone’s contribution, to evaluate these contributions and turn them into rewards.We call this an access to benefits algorithm.

In some sense, the access to benefits algorithm is a distributed solution to time management, which can be applied to large scale and very dynamic peer production processes. It embodies positive and negative incentives, and can contain parameters to influence individual participation and quality of contributions, it can regulate behavior, it gamifies production. For example, a reputation system can be tied to the access to benefits algorithm: a higher reputation results in a higher reward, all other things being equal, and vice versa. Moreover, it can also contain parameters to incentivise periodic and frequent contributions, and to prioritize important processes.

Contribution accounting and network resource planning

The long tail mode of production needs a contribution accounting system in order to allow fair redistribution of rewards. It allows participants to record contributions of various types and it uses an access to benefits algorithm to turn them into benefits. But this is only the first part of the story.

In the OVN model contributions are attributed to the creation of resources, which can be documents, designs, parts or full prototypes, etc. (some contributions go into infrastructure of community development and they lack clear resource or deliverables). From the resource level, contributions aggregate at the project level. A project is an open venture, or a business unit. It is the smallest unit within the OVN that can generate all sorts of benefits, including revenue.

The fact that contributions can be attributed directly to resources (not projects) is very important for commons-based peer production (CBPP), which builds on open source. On Github, pieces of open source software (OSS) can be picked up by someone and remixed into something else. Open source hardware (OSHW) development follows the same path, i.e. designs (mechanical, electronic, optical) are forked and remixed. This ability to fork and remix parts of more complex systems makes open source development a very efficient process. This explains why modularity and interoperability are very important properties of OSS and OSHW. If rewards are envisioned for the work done, CBPP needs to find a way to account for contributions at the resource level and to track the way resources are put together in different contexts (projects are considered contexts). If contributions are only recorded at the project level, projects become silos of economic activity with a reduced possibility of benefits flows between them.

Taking into consideration the structure of OSS development, the solution to the benefit/reward redistribution problem is to attach some information to individual resources created that allows their reevaluation later, when they get remixed and integrated into larger systems, in other contexts. The metrics of evaluation can vary depending on the context. This is the role of the network resource planning system NRP, which allows benefits/rewards to propagate upwards through value streams and the creation of a single resource can generate rewards from many different sources (many projects), depending on how many successful projects are using it.

This goes even further, because this same NRP also provides a growth mechanism for CBPP networks. To illustrate this, imagine that members of a CBPP community decide to attribute equity to resources that are created by other communities. (Example: SENSORICA decides to integrate a piece of open source hardware developed by another OSHW community). First, why would SENSORICA affiliates decide to diminish their revenue by giving equity to other groups when they can just copy the open source design? The economic rationale is to reduce efforts required to internalize new capacity (new knowledge and know how around that piece of open hardware) and to increase the speed of execution (a first to market advantage). CBPP networks grow by affiliation. By offering equity to other CBPP communities they are essentially building bridges to innovate faster and improve production processes. This is the higher-level structure of networks-of-networks (see the Open Alliance).

We believe that in order to sustain the CBPP we need to create infrastructure that allows attribution of value-related properties to individual resources, to allow reevaluation of these individual resources in context, and to facilitate the formation of networks-of-networks that preserve the individuality of every community part of it, but at the same time brings them together on the same economic platform.

Contribution accounting in transition models

As the economy transitions to a networked state, existing organizations are trying to adapt. We already see traditional corporations going from in-house R&D, to outsourcing R&D and more recently to crowdsourcing R&D. This movement is forced by the need to innovate fast, and by the fact that open source lowers the price to a point where traditional high-tech corporations can be put out of business. Crowdsourcing R&D means utilizing all sorts of schemes to attract the participation of the crowd into innovation processes that are sponsored by these corporations. In early crowdsourcing practices corporations tried to control the innovation by signing non-disclosure agreements with the participants. Crowdsourcing platforms were created to match corporate projects with skilled individuals. The practice was competitive, i.e. the company would chose a winner among different proposals, and usually the winner was rewarded with money. This practice gradually became more open, since the first iteration of crowdsourcing platforms were not very successful in attracting highly skilled individuals. In order to attract innovation, in order to grow open innovation communities around them, corporations need to think seriously about the reward mechanisms they put in place. It is not so difficult to understand why the early crowdfunding platforms were not very good attractors. I would not compete in a call by a company to design something for a few bucks, with a good probability of losing the race, knowing that the company will monopolize the work and probably make a lot of profits on it. The trend is to go from closed crowdsourcing to truly open source innovation, which must be accompanied by a broadening of the reward system. Since companies are going to deal with the crowd more and more, they need a contribution accounting system to account for contributions. See this presentation by SENSORICA making the distinction between competitive crowdsourcing and collaborative crowdsourcing.

In parallel to the adaptation of traditional companies we also see the creation of hybrid organizations and models. For example, in the realm or hardware, we have the emergence of ecosystems like Arduino and 3D Robotics/DIY Drones. They are composed of a traditional for-profit organization surrounded by an open source community. This post describes the situation. The difference here is that in most cases the open source community pre-existed the traditional for-profit, the later being created to manufacture and to distribute the products that are based on the innovation created by the open community. These hybrid models, the ones that are sustainable and successful, maintain an precarious equilibrium between the profit motive that can arise within the centralized traditional organization the open and sharing culture within the open innovation community. In some cases, this equilibrium is not maintained and the synergy between the two entities disappears, destroying the ecosystem. This was the case of Makerbot and the RepRap community, well captured in the Netflix documentary Print the Legend.

Photo by Muffet

The post Why do we need a contribution accounting system? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

But how, then, to account for the many kinds of value that are intangible, social or ecological in nature, and without prices – activities such as child-rearing and eldercare, ecological stewardship, online peer production, and commoning?  There is an urgent need to begin to make these forms of value explicitly visible in our political economy and culture.

Two new reports plunge into this complicated but essential topic.  The first one – discussed below — is called “Value in the Commons Economy:  Developments in Open and Contributory Value Accounting,” The 49-page report by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros focuses on socially created value on digital networks. It was co-published yesterday by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and P2P Foundation.

Another important report on how to reconceptualize value – an account of a three-day Commons Strategies Group workshop on this topic – will be released in a few days and presented here.

The P2P Foundation report declares that “society is shifting from a system based on value created in a market system (through labor and capital) to one which recognizes broader value streams,” such as the social and creative value generated by online communities.  The rise of these new types of value – i.e., use-value generated by commoners working outside of typical market structures – is forcing us to go beyond the simple equation of price = value.

Michel Bauwens and sociologist Adam Arvidsson call this the “value crisis” of our time.  Commons-based peer production on open platforms is enabling people to create new forms of value, such as open source software, wikis, sharing via social networks, and creative collaborations.  Yet paradoxically, only a small minority of players is able to capture and monetize this value.  Businesses like Facebook, Google and Twitter use their proprietary platforms to strictly control the terms of sharing; collect and sell massive amounts of personal data; and pay nothing to commoners who produced the value in the first place.

This is highly extractive, and not (re)generative.  So what can be done?  How could open platforms be transformed to bolster the commons and serve as a regenerative social force?

The P2P Foundation report is a welcome splash of clarity on a topic that is often obscured by deceptive terms like the “sharing economy” and mystifications about the structural realities of digital cooperation.

The Bauwens/Niaros report starts with a section analyzing the theoretical nature of the “value crisis” we are experiencing, before moving on to three powerful case studies of alternative value-systems pioneered by the Enspiral network, Sensorica and Backfeed.  The report concludes with a series of policy recommendations for changing the economic and political infrastructure.

The Value Crisis

The real roots of the “value crisis” stem from the fact that “contemporary capitalist value-practices are no longer able to determine what value is,” write Bauwens and Niaros.  Stock market valuations are notoriously unable to attribute a reliable (financial) value to a company because so much value resides in social intangibles – the goodwill of consumers, brand reputations, and social sharing.  Stock analysts can try to add up the resale value of factory buildings, equipment and office furniture, but there is no reliable, consensus method for assigning a value to all the social beliefs and activities that make a company valuable.

Such a delicious irony!  Contemporary capitalism loves that it can freely appropriate software code, personal data, user-generated information, videos, etc. – a shareable cultural abundance that the world has never seen before.  Yet investors have great difficulty in monetizing and commodifying this value.  It is hard to make abundant social value artificially scarce and therefore saleable.

So we have the spectacle of commoners having trouble protecting the use-value that they create, which businesses are aggressively trying to channel into extractive market production and consumption.  (“Extractive” because companies want this value for free, and don’t want to reward the social communities.)  And yet even with their great extractive powers (lots of capital, copyright laws, terms of service contracts, etc.), large companies are finding that it is difficult to develop reliable flows of profit.

Toward Value Sovereignty

The focus of the P2P Foundation report is how to move from an extractive digital economy to a regenerative one.  Hence the focus on how three digital communities are trying to protect their “value practices” and create a “value sovereignty” beyond the pressures of capitalist markets.  These communities are trying to achieve a “reverse co-optation” by generating value flows from the old economy to the new, and by developing new value-accounting systems to properly honor social contributions.

One such project is Enspiral, a highly participatory, mission-driven coalition of entrepreneurs and other entities, many of them based in New Zealand.  “Enspiral calls itself an ‘open cooperative’ because of its commitment to both the production of commons and an orientation to the common good,” write Bauwens and Niaros. One of its innovations is the use of “capped returns,” which puts a limit on how much an investor in the Enspiral infrastructure can receive in return.  As the report notes:

….the shares issued by a company would be coupled by a matching call option which would require the repurchase of the shares at an agreed upon price.  Once all shares have been repurchased by the company, it will be free to reinvest all future profits to its social mission. Through this mechanism, external and potentially extractive capital is ‘subsumed’ and disciplined to become ‘cooperative capital.’”

Sensorica is an open collaborative network that is experimenting with new ways to combine commons and market forms.  It has an elaborate “value accounting system” for keeping track of its members’ contributions to market-based projects. This system is then used to allocate revenues in proportion to each member’s role. Is Sensorica a new kind of (market-driven) co-op or a new type of (mission-based) commons?  Maybe a hybrid.

A third case study looks at Backfeed, a production community that relies on the blockchain ledger as an infrastructure for decentralized production.  Backfeed is more of an aggregation of individuals working together to sell to markets, than a commons.  Still, the cooperative organizational structure has the potential for making it capable of acting as a “value sovereign” community. Many others are exploring how the blockchain might enable cooperative control over a community’s resources, whether for sale in the market or for internal use-value.

Policy Recommendations

The P2P Foundation report concludes with a series of policy recommendations that would help protect the kinds of value regimes described in the case studies.  It proposes open cooperatives to create new types of livelihoods and the use of “reciprocity-based licensing” to protect against value capture by capitalist enterprises and foster solidarity among generative coalitions.  The report also calls for open supply chains and common network resource planning to help promote an open source “circular economy”(e.g., “design global, manufacture local”).

Bauwens and Niaros envision new sorts of political collaboration to provide a counter-power to the old economy and advocacy for peer production communities.  Local “chambers of commons” and “commons-oriented entrepreneurial associations” are needed, not to mention new forms of transnational collaboration, they urge.

At a time when the political left has trouble moving beyond Keynesian economic models and the management of neoliberalism’s many crises, Bauwens and Niaros point to some new models of commons-based peer production that could help transform the terms of engagement.

The post How to Move from an Extractive to a Generative Economy? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the original notes to the video

Which new social structure are we evolving towards? Michel Bauwens tries to work this out by looking at contemporary practices that address the challenges of the future in the most direct way. He identifies an exponential growth of civil initiatives that experiment both locally and globally with new models and solutions. Behind the scenes, an entirely new set of values is being built up, with discoveries such as new types of contributory accounting to manage common property, open logistics systems for the circular economy, and so on. Michel Bauwens and the network of researchers into the emerging commons-based economy present a summary of 10 years of research.
• Michel Bauwens is a Belgian cyber philosopher and founder of the P2P Foundation, which carries out research into peer-to-peer-networks and practices. In 2013, together with Jean Lievens, he published the book De Wereld Redden, met peer-to-peer naar een post-kapitalistische samenleving (‘Saving the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer to peer’).

Timecodes

These timecodes have been sources by William Charlton:

• 10:24 Kojin Karatani – The Structure of World History, Karl Polanyi – The Great Transformation
• 17:42 Giorgio Agamben – The Highest Poverty, Contributory Accounting, P2P Value – https://p2pvalue.eu/
• 23:50 Guerrilla Translation – http://www.guerrillatranslation.org/
• 24:08 David Bollier – Think like a Commoner – http://www.thinklikeacommoner.com/
• 26:00 Netarchical capital – http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137406897_4 and http://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Netarchical_Capitalism
• 26:28 Hyper-Neo-Liberalism, Generative Value Regime
• 27:30 Enspiral – http://enspiral.com/
• 29:06 4 Forms – (Karatani) Pooling, Reciprocity, Markets and State Redistribution
• 29:49 Why Capitalism?
• 31:00 Cooptates
• 31:10 Terre de Liens – https://www.terredeliens.org/
• 32:43 Driftless Area Wisconsin – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driftless_Area
• 33:50 Reintegrate Externalities – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
• 35:30 Wikispeed – http://wikispeed.org/
• 36:50 Capped Investments – https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Joshua_Vial_on_the_Introduction_of_Capped_Investments_for_Commons_Projects
• 38:00 Douglas Rushkoff – Life Inc – http://www.rushkoff.com/books/life-inc/
• 40:00 Ethical markets in Middle Ages
• 40:28 Execute speculators!
• 40:56 100 industrial sectors. All inviable if externalities are included Ditto CAC 40 (French Stock market)
• 41:30 Corporations v Cooperation
• 42:20 Lamps that burn forever
• 43:00 Mutualisation
• 43:30 Jevons’ paradox – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons%27s_paradox – see also the Coal Question http://oilcrash.net/media/pdf/The_Coal_Question.pdf
• 44:00 Uber – the reality
• 46:09 Cosmo-localization – http://actionforesight.net/cosmo-localization/ and https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Cosmo-Localization
• 48:10 Mark Whitaker – Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe – https://www.amazon.com/Ecological…/dp/383830022X
• 50:30 Mutualisation of knowledge, Mutualising infrastructure and relocalising production.
• 52:17 A political voice for Commoners
• 58:00 Trans-National Localisation
• 1:00:00 Q and A

Michel Bauwens – TEN NEW PRACTICES OF THE GREAT TRANSITION from Kaaitheater on Vimeo.

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