What if, in going out to meet real people, you decided to keep travelling?

The Decentralized Society Research Project demonstrates this philosophy. Included on the website is a link to “offices” (hackerbases) throughout the world.

Extracted from: http://dsrp.eu/about

I am Mathijs de Bruin from The Netherlands. Having been frustrated for a long time about living as part of ‘the system’ (the economic and social structures that dominate our lives) I decided to exchange my house in Amsterdam for a more sustainable and humane form of life.

Within several (3-4) years my plan is to either join or found a sustainable community, being largely independent of dominating power structures forcing the exploitation of our planet and one another.

However, I do not know yet what this would look like.

• What would be the best way to organize, how can we make sure all participants are fully represented?
• How can we allow sustainable forms of living to scale, allowing more people to live in harmony with their environment?
• What can be done to lower (economic) barriers for people to escape ‘the system’?

These and other questions I am trying to answer, while I am travelling around Europe visiting several sustainable communities or eco-villages but also hackerspaces and related events. Taking part in communnity life, contributing and talking to founders, philosophers, researchers and fellow travelers.

Extracted from: https://decentralize.hackpad.com/Decentralized-Society-Research-Project-T0zwOQD4JaS

http://dsrp.eu

Open Source

This project, as well as the communities in focus, work along an Open Source or ‘libre’ principles where:

• Sharing is the default: unless privacy prohibits there should be full transparency at all times.
• Leaders have no (formal) authority of any kind.
• ‘Forking’ allows for fragmentation without degradation, allowing (fundamental) disagreements to persist while maintaining the strength of collaboration.

Photo by Lyalka

Photo by Lyalka

Photo by duncan

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Kevin Stark: SMart is a social enterprise founded in 1998 in Belgium. The project’s aim is to simplify the careers of freelancers in cities across Europe where SMart operates. These days, there are many freelancer services — cooperatives, coworking spaces, unions — but at the time of its inception, SMart officials were focused on one subsection of this workforce: artists. “That’s how we started,” says Lieza Dessein, a project and community manager for SMart. “What we realize is that a lot of artists have the same kind of issues when they are working. For example, a band would make up a contract. The band would actually pay the musicians with that single contract. And they had very irregular revenues.”

Dessein said the original idea was to take all the bookkeeping and other administrative tasks off of the artist. “The solution that they came up with was, OK we will just make up a company,” she said. “So instead of every artist needing to develop its own legal entity to be able to work, we will just share a company with the artists.”

Today, setting-up a coworking platform is not uncommon, but at the time it was a bold idea. Over the years, SMart expanded to provide services for many other types of freelancers, and changed with the evolving nature of work. Dessein spoke with us about the evolution of the project.

Kevin Stark, Shareable: I’m a freelancer in Chicago, and to my knowledge, we don’t have an organization that is as comprehensive as SMart. If I were moving to Brussels, how would you pitch me on the program? 

Lieza Dessein, SMart EU: We are a shared company. It’s quite important for us. We have over 90,000 members here in Belgium alone. And active members on a yearly basis, we are around 20,000. Active members are members who log in between one and three times a year. All of that together in 2016, they billed to our company in Belgium 136 million euros. We’re operating in nine European countries.

The development of the project in European countries is quite different from country to country. They’re not all that far developed as Belgium. Belgium is the mother house. For 20 years, we’ve had a full range of services. Our business model is a patient one. We grow steadily and smoothly and build up the community inside each country. We make sure that everything we are doing is under a legal frame that exists in that country, and we need also to adapt it to the culture in each country and in the communities. I would say, we haven’t changed all that much but we have shifted with the realization that the work environment has changed.

I love the lifestyle associated with freelancing and the freedom to work on a wide range of projects. The only rub for me is the stability and the lack of community. What’s different about SMart?  

We have a whole range of services, and the most important one is that people who work with us to guarantee that they will be paid in seven days after the end of a contract — even if the client hasn’t paid yet. We have a mutualized salary guarantee fund, and we take care of the debt collection for the freelancers as well. We share the company with our freelancers. We become the employer of all our freelancers and take on the responsibility linked to the employer status. The reason why we decided to become the employer of the freelancers is that for the moment it’s very difficult for freelancers to access social protection and the best social protection you can get is linked to the employment contract. And, if we manage to put everybody on the employment contract they have easier access to social protection as well.

How has the project evolved over time?

Smart means Societe Mutuelle pour ARTistes (mutualized company for artists). It was a company that aimed to take over the administrative burden linked to artistic entrepreneurship. Little by little we developed a tool that could cover a wider range of professions and we opened up to all freelancers. It’s an evolution that little by little you realize that you have a tool that can serve a whole new community that you weren’t planning to serve. There was this shift to make in the mind. We were saying, “Is it actually possible?” Because it’s a little bit frightening to say. I’m focused on musician, artist people in the theater. And it’s like you can have a grasp of that reality, and suddenly you get people working in the care service — everything that’s related to massage, yoga. We have I.T. consultants, and you get all those different professions. For the advisors, it could be overwhelming. We really rationalized: What are the needs of that community as a whole? What are the needs? They are the same as the freelancers. Along with shifting our mindset, we also strengthened our team with advisors coming from a wide range of different professions to make sure we have people who have a good grasp on particular professions.

What were some of those needs?

Our members have an irregular income, multiple clients, being an employee and then becoming an employer, develop different skills and jobs. We have a very fractured job environment where they will work a lot during the year and then not always in the summer. If you really take the whole community and say what are the needs? Instead of focusing on the differences — they need this, and they need that. At one point to say, where are the similarities? If you look at not from the perspective of differences but on a perspective of similarities. We needed to open up our services. Because freelancers — and artists — are evolving in complex legal issues, are confronted to a lot of administration and the risks involved in individual entrepreneurship are high.

SMart was evolving with the changing nature of work?

The workforce is more and more scattered and individualized. And you have all those individual entrepreneurs and the old school way of doing things is to say: I’m an individual entrepreneur,so I will set up my own legal entity. I will go for my own little office somewhere lost in city.

If you scale that model you can see that you are facing very isolated society where every individual is on their own and facing the same kind of difficulties. How do I set-up a company? How do I make myself known? How do I meet fellow people that are working in the same field? How do I find clients? Suddenly if we say, let us take over the administration, and then if you need training we have training sessions. And for the moment we are also investing in work spaces. We are really looking into different ways of bringing back [collectivism] among that scattered workforce. How do you reinvent solidarity amongst individual entrepreneurs? How do you make people create a community that eases their entrepreneurship? How do we reinvent the social protection for all workers?

Images: SMart’s website

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Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

The post To Create a Real Sharing Economy, Think Replication — Not Just Scale appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“We wanted Darwin to be about inventing new ways of working, new ways of doing business, new ways of enjoying life. It was about reinventing the city. From the outset, our ambitions came up against the limits imposed by environmental concerns, at a time of major upheaval, resource shortages, and, whatever some might say, ever-mounting greenhouse gas emissions. A word in which efforts to curb travel have failed and food security is at stake. We can’t think about the city, about new ways of working, new types of business, or new kinds of leisure activities without looking at their environmental impact. This is what we are trying to do at Darwin: question these effects, question the consequences of our acts on a daily basis. So we decided to seek the best ways of going about limiting such impacts.”*

– Jean Marc Gancille, Darwin and Evolution co-founder

The post The Origin of Spaces: Bordeaux appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Enspiral Space is Enspiral’s co-working facility in Wellington, New Zealand. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Anna Bergren Miller  describes the inner workings of Enspiral, one of our favourite, P2P-based, social entrepreneurial networks. This article was originally published at Shareable.

While it seems clear that New Zealand-based social enterprise network Enspiral is doing exciting things in the social impact space, it can be difficult, at first, to understand what exactly Enspiral is. It is easier to begin with what Enspiral is not. Enspiral is not an incubator or an accelerator. It is not a training program, nor is it an advisory service. The website’s FAQ page, which describes Enspiral as “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” offers both a promise and a warning to would-be Enspiralites. “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground,” it suggests. “But you’ll need to find your own way, and there’s no program or official support.”

Enspiral’s hard-to-pin-downness is in part a product of its decentralized organizational structure, which is sometimes described as an open value network. The avoidance of power hierarchies is at the heart of the network’s mission. “From the beginning, the first idea was more people working on stuff that matters,” said founder Joshua Vial. “But it was also this idea about decentralized organizations—that there’s a real possibility, with technology now, for different management structures.”

Enspiral Members answer the question: What is Enspiral?

Vial launched Enspiral in 2010, several years after quitting his job at a web development company to split his time between volunteering and contract work. He began meeting people who, like him, were interested in social and environmental issues, but who—unlike him—didn’t have a steady source of income. “So I thought, if I can help other people get higher-paid contract work, maybe we can do interesting things together,” he recalled. He reoriented his consulting business to a collective focused on helping socially-minded professionals find work. “I started saying yes to every contract that came my way, and scrambling to find people,” he said. “We were just looking for like-minded folks.”

In four years, Enspiral evolved from a vision of “more people working on stuff that matters” to a global network of socially-minded individuals and enterprises. (Courtesy Enspiral)

From the start, Enspiral eschewed salaries and emphasized a marketplace model of resource distribution. “There are people with skills and there are different projects, but they’ve got clear budgets and clear deliverables,” explained Vial. “We allocate people to projects in different ways. That’s the key mechanic to getting things done.”

Around 2012, as the company continued to grow, Enspiral hired an administrative staff, which they called a “support crew.” But within a year, it became apparent that “it really didn’t work for us at all,” said Vial. “We started to get divergent experiences from the support crew and the contractors, and it felt like we were just under-resourcing a management team. We were doing things like you would at a normal organization.” So the administrative staff did something that is unlikely to happen at a “normal organization:” they fired themselves.

The Enspiral network includes over 150 contributors and friends from around the world. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Today, the hub of the Enspiral network is Enspiral Foundation, which Vial pictures “as the campfire we all sit around to have a collective discussion.” Enspiral regularly hosts public gatherings, like afternoon teas at Enspiral Space, its co-working office. Individuals interested in participating on a more regular basis can become an Enspiral Contributor by paying an annual fee to cover core operating costs. (The Foundation subsidies people who want to be involved but cannot afford to pay.) The next level of commitment is membership. Enspiral Members are usually involved in the group for at least a year before being invited, and are expected to participate in collective decision-making, and to attend retreats and other in-person events.

Individuals can choose among multiple levels of engagement. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral, though legally a limited liability company, acts as a cooperative. Every Enspiral Member owns one share in the organization. Shares cannot be sold, and the company does not pay dividends. “It’s your citizenship card in the collective, pretty much. Our Members are the ultimate locus of power in the group,” explained Vial. Enspiral Members make administrative decisions and budget collectively, with help from several open-source software programs. These include Loomio, a collective decision-making platform, and Cobudget, both of which were developed within the Enspiral network.

Enspiral Members participate in collaborative decision-making and budgeting. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral Ventures are companies that have voluntary revenue sharing and mutual support agreements with Enspiral Foundation. The agreements are flexible, and may be changed with one month’s notice from either party. Enspiral Ventures do not have any decision-making power in Enspiral Foundation beyond allocating the part of the budget they contributed through the collective funding process. “But because the Members are pretty much starting and running the companies, they’re doing it as a way of putting some of their effort and money into support for our whole mission of Enspiral,” said Vial. “It’s much less about, ‘Let’s go find sponsors we’re not that close to to give us money, because they want to get brand recognition,'” he explained. “It’s much more a collective of companies saying, ‘We’re all dependent upon one another. If we can make this central organization strong, then we’ll all get benefits from a richer community.'”

Enspiral Members commit to attending online meetings and in-person events, including retreats. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Enspiral’s financial model is simple: pay what you want. The organization experimented with equity-sharing, but Enspiral Foundation recently returned the shares. “We didn’t want to have the different dynamic of companies being bound together because they had no money to start with, and then they gave equity instead,” said Vial. “As opposed to other Ventures, which, because they were cash-rich, just contributed cash the whole time, and then can walk away with one month’s notice.”

As a result, Enspiral Ventures’ contributions vary by company. Enspiral Services, Vial’s original company, collects up to 20% of the revenue generated by each independent contractor under its umbrella. It then gives one-quarter of these contributions to the Foundation, using the remaining 15% to cover internal expenses and fund Services projects. Contractors can change the percentage they contribute to Enspiral Services on a contract-by-contract basis, and Enspiral Services, like all Enspiral Ventures, can renegotiate their contract with Enspiral Foundation at will. “It’s like, if you’re giving the Foundation too much money, then change your contract and tell us what you want to pay,” said Vial. “It becomes a prompt for conversation if some people contribute a lot and others don’t. It also gives you really good visibility over the value people put on the network.”

Enspiral Foundation is funded by voluntary contributions from Enspiral Ventures. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Dubious by the standards of conventional business practice, Enspiral’s funding strategy is working. Vial estimates that company brings in about NZ$10,000 each month through Enspiral Foundation, plus another NZ$10-12,000 from Enspiral Services. As the company expands, and as the Ventures secure larger contracts, a logical next step is direct funding of new social enterprises. “I think we’ll start to have enough financial strength to really invest in stuff rather than bootstrapping it,” said Vial. “Because a lot of us are tired of that approach. It’s hard work, especially when you do it over and over again.”

This sign appeared in Enspiral’s kitchen, a reminder that learning to say “no” is as important as saying “yes” in a collaborative workplace. (Courtesy Enspiral)

Not every company can be Enspiral, notes Vial. It would be hard to apply the Enspiral approach to existing organizations. “It’s just too different,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Hey everyone, you’re not getting salaried any more.'” And getting an Enspiral-type endeavor off the ground takes a certain amount of both patience and faith. Vial has heard from a number of groups worldwide interested in emulating Enspiral, but as yet none have come to fruition. In most cases, interest fizzled out after Vial made it clear that he could offer advice but not financial support.

Nevertheless, “I think if you’re doing a professional services collective, or if people are doing a community of social enterprises, then it’s a really powerful model for organizing,” said Vial. He sees particular promise in the area of urban innovation. “I think a lot of what we’ve learned is directly relevant to them,” he said. “When I look at the ‘let’s change our cities’ sort of community, often they’re really strapped for cash, and they’ve got really marginal business models.” Bike shares and community gardens are great, said Vial, “but they’re either cash sinks or they just scrape by.”

What worked for Enspiral would work equally well for would-be urban reformers, he says: convincing highly-paid professional service workers (like lawyers, accountants, or programmers) to sign on to a collective based on contract work. “It was hard work, but it wasn’t really risky,” explained Vial. “And off the back of that, this really rich ecosystem and financial base emerged for funding the more marginal businesses.” He wants people interested in urban environmental and social justice to know that Enspiral is there for them. “We’d love to help them get up and running,” he said. “I think this could be a really significant way to leverage wider resource flows for people who want to change the city, and change the world.”

Anyone can get involved in Enspiral, either through virtual friendship or at in-person community events, like this women’s tea. (Courtesy Enspiral)

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