The crowd funding campaign for the startup of platform cooperative Incubator.coop has now been launched – you can learn more and support it here.

There’s problems with traditional incubators that no-one in “startup land” wants to admit. The problem is simple: incubators serve investors, not incubatee’s. That’s why we created incubator.coop – it addresses a real-world economic failure. Incubators can’t find enough fee’s from a target market that by definition is cash and resource poor. So incubators serve their investors as a deal-flow mechanism. They do not serve startups. In Australia, Pollenizer, the first startup incubator shuttered after just 9-years of business and after several pivots. The rest will follow if they don’t serve up good deal flow.

The quest for a better incubator leads to a better form of business

The future – according to those that hang out in the Co-Op sector – belongs to collective endeavours. It belongs to Platform CoOps not Venture-Backed 2-sided marketplaces.

The future is not a new AGL powered by wind and solar. The future belongs to hundreds if not thousands of community-level energy co-ops.

Introducing incubator.coop at the New Economy Conference

Short-fallings of Conventional Incubators

1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves. Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners. We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.
2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets. We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.
3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent. We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours.
4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach. We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.
5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%. We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote.
6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months. We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.

Crowd Is Key

In the future, every business will continue to live and die by its service to the group of stakeholders a company may refer to as ‘shareholders, customers, employees and community’. But, in the future we’ll call these stakeholders the “crowd”.

The strength of the “crowd” will determine success more than historically as transparency, block-chain and social-media mean traditional market barriers become obsolete.

Crowdsource Instead of Top-Down

A crowd needs a place to develop ideas of mutual interest. This harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.

Given a bit of guidance and time crowd-sweat can bring ideas to the stage of maturity, where a crowd-fund campaign can test “product-market fit” whilst qualifying future customers and investors.

The best ideas will attract a crowd and develop. The ones without a crowd won’t develop. This is somewhat Darwinian on purpose. We think it’s better to put startup ideas through a ‘natural selection’ process than a ‘VC selection’ process.

Crowdfunding

We believe crowdfunding is an essential role in new venture development. So we are running our own through this soft launch phase until November 1, 2017.

Photo by Thad Zajdowicz

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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

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Russian hackers are not the only entity in the news accused of illicit influence. Last year,  tech and scientific stars warned that artificial intelligence could eventually take over, everything.

Which brings us to pol.is, our featured project in this second installment of the Democracy Series. Pol.is.  was adopted by vTaiwan to power their super-competent democracy experiment.

The pol.is home page opens to display the pol.is logo and a tagline,

AI powered conversations

Aritificial Intelligence and voting. What could go wrong?

Speaking in the present moment, AI appears to obey its’ developers intentions. Pol.is uses AI to deliver true “crowdsourced discussion”. No one’s ideas are buried as they can be in threaded discussion.

The essence of super-competent democracy is the ability of government to adopt and implement ideas from the citizenry. Pol.is Artificial Intelligence embeds each commentor’s ideas into the DNA of a discussion. This enables government to evolve rather than distill.

Extracted from: https://pol.is/company

Mission & Vision

pol.is was conceived around the time of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. We felt if millions of people were going to show up to a conversation, the internet needed something that would scale up. We set out to build a communication system that would handle ‘big’ and stay coherent. We wanted people to feel safe & listened to, and we felt it was of the highest importance that minority opinions be preserved rather than ‘outvoted’.

Extracted from: http://civichall.org/civicist/vtaiwan-democracy-frontier/

While vTaiwan was finding its legs, open-source conference organizers in Taiwan were dealing with a divisive issue within their own community. Chia-Liang Kao, a co-founder of the g0v.tw community, introduced pol.is and found that it visually defined and gave space to divergent opinion groups and broke the community’s deadlock by identifying the points of consensus.

Based on that success, the second and current version of vTaiwan now uses pol.is. Pol.is is a survey technology where the user clicks “agree,” “disagree,” or “pass” in response to statements others have contributed. The user can also enter their own statement for others to take positions on. Pol.is clusters users who voted similarly into opinion groups using realtime machine learning (artificial intelligence), and visualizes those groups in real time.

Once vTaiwan deployed pol.is, participation scaled a hundredfold, the complexity of issues grappled with increased, and the volunteer moderators were no longer needed during the “crowd-sourced agenda setting” phase. After years of closely iterating with the vTaiwan team, pol.is was recently open sourced, greenlighting its longterm integration into governing processes.

Extracted from: https://blog.pol.is/examining-pol-is-as-a-survey-methodology-24bcabce4cb?source=collection_home_________3_________—6——3

BRIDGING THE DIVIDE

pol.is is capable of providing much of the same functionality to researchers that other standard online survey platform do via its ability to present specific ideas or questions to participants and record their agreement/disagreement with them.

Whereas this is the limit of other surveying approaches, however, it is only a starting point for pol.is.

Though researchers may begin with seeding a conversation with particular prompts and opinions related to said prompt, the capacity of pol.is to then go several steps further inviting participants to react with their own words and then allow other participants to respond and react to those reactions entails that the researchers will not be confined to capturing only the information they thought to collect from the group before they began their study.

This same functionality also allows researchers to, in real time, ask further follow up questions to the group on important but unexpected new themes that emerge from the conversation. In this respect, pol.is essentially allows researchers to have, in one tool, both the systematicness of a survey and the sorts of rich, organic observations that are usually found through focus groups or interviews.

Beyond this unusual capacity to bridge breadth and depth of individually produced information, pol.is is also able to provide a streamlined way for researchers to quickly look at and digest higher order information on the relationships between individuals and their responses to each other. Specifically, by using patterns of agreement/disagreement to map the space of collective thinking and opinion and then using the actual content of conversations to allow researchers to interpret that space, pol.is proves uncommonly objective in summarizing large amounts of rich social data quickly and easily.

Though this “out of the box” functionality does not represent anywhere near the extent of analysis that can potentially be done with the data pol.is captures, it is an unexpectedly sophisticated level of ready-made analysis.

Extracted from: https://medium.com/cidades-democr%C3%A1ticas/how-pol-is-is-being-adopted-by-cidade-democr%C3%A1tica-in-brazil-1fd744b2aece#.5zywcmz7a

First of all, our decision in adopting and expanding pol.is’ engine is based on the above diagnostic that we need to improve our collective deliberation tools in two main complementary challenging aspects. First, the deliberation tool should achieve higher levels of mass engagement in free (as in freedom) collective deliberation. Second, it should foster collective engagement that overcomes the confrontation logic of social media (swarming and campaigns) and enable collaboration between government and society towards common goods.

The pol.is engine is well suited to address the first challenging aspect of achieving higher levels of mass engagement because it proposes a seamless and minimalist way of participating. The easiest way people can participate on its engine is just casting a reaction to a tweet-size comment (proposal) randomly selected from all comments submitted. This kind of participation can be completed in less than a minute.

In a progressive way, after reacting to a comment, people can keep reacting until they reach the last of the comments or, submit their own perspective as a comment. This new comment will then be part of the comments deck and available for the other participants to cast reactions to.

In the pol.is engine, participants can’t reply to a comment. Its architecture does away with replies in order to formulate a matrix of comments and reactions. All the information gave by participants is accounted. Good comments and ideas will not be lost on enormous discussions trees but will be presented as an equal to other participants cast reactions. Discussions architecture like pol.is?—?that we call “Crowdsourced Discussion”?—?are different from traditional forums?—?that we call “Threaded Discussion”.

In a “Crowdsourced Discussion” all information given is utilized. In a “Threaded Discussion”, as it depends on later systematization, part of the information (sometimes most of it) is discharged by the process. We’re not specifically advocating for abandoning the “Threaded Discussion” architecture, as we think it’s still important for many deliberation experiences, specially for small-medium groups. But we realize that it poses serious mass engagement limitations.

Now, let’s go to the second challenging aspect, that is to foster participants engagement on collective actions. The pol.is engine uses machine learning algorithms to interpret the data matrix built by the comments and people reactions in real-time. That matrix is processed in a way people can be organized in affinity groups based on how they participate on each comment.

The information about those group formations is updated in real-time and is exhibited in a way people can had a sense of moving around in a physical, tactile space towards their tribe. That’s very innovative, as the pol.is interface provides a democratic and transparent dashboard that not only the system administration can see but every participant or viewer. Everybody can understand and download the data about the groups that were formed on the discussion, how each comments performed in each group, what were the majority comment within all groups, which group you are in and who are the other group members.

Extracted from: https://blog.pol.is/uber-responds-to-vtaiwans-coherent-blended-volition-3e9b75102b9b?source=collection_home_________2_________—6——2

Focusing on Coherence

Designed for car drivers and passengers with mobile phones, the initial screen of our Pol.is survey shows just one statement, placing the participant among several groups of people:

As the participant clicks?—?Agree or Disagree, their avatar moves toward a group with similar feelings, and the next statement shows up; everyone can contribute any number of statements for others to vote on.
For the UberX survey, we asked everyone to begin their statements with “My feeling is…”?—?and everyone can respond to each other by sharing their feelings in return.

We sent all stakeholders the Pol.is survey’s URL at the same predetermined time, to ensure a balanced diversity of participants. Four broad groups of people soon emerged: Taxi drivers, Uber drivers, Uber passengers, and other passengers.

During the first few days, people shared strong feelings that appealed other groups close by. The four groups quickly merged into two, with Group 1 (45%) identifying with the following statement:

Since the Ministry has already rejected Uber’s administrative appeal, I think Taipei city government should cancel the company registration of “Taiwan Uber Inc.” [75%]

Group 2 took a completely different side:
When I am not in a hurry, I prefer to call Uber even if there are plenty of taxis in the street. [77%]

Note that 75% of Group 1 amounts to just 33% of total participants, meaning there were more people disagreeing with the two statements above than people who agreed.

Because Pol.is displays statements with the most support first, participants brainstormed on statements that appeal to more people. A week later, Group 1 toned down the original statement somewhat:

I think it is the responsibility of the Ministry to actively outlaw unlicensed passenger vehicles. [87%]

Group 2, meanwhile, gained a two percent increase from 54% to 56% under this statement, which garnered cross-group acceptance:

Currently, the only way for traditional taxis to survive is to join a taxi fleet. This is not due to a government policy, and UberX has subverted this unwritten rule. I think it is quite awesome! [93%]

Pol.is shows each group how much their shared sentiments are received by other groups, thereby encouraging participants to contribute ever more inclusive statements that show up in the “Majority Opinion” tab, such as this one by Irvin Chen:

The government should leverage this opportunity to challenge the taxi industry to improve their management & quality control system, so that drivers & riders would enjoy the same quality service as Uber. (95%, across all groups) .

By the fourth week, participants have contributed a coherent set of reflections, expectations and suggestions, successfully forming a coherent agenda for stakeholders to respond to.

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An interesting situation has developed with the proposed Star Trek ‘fan film’ Axanar which may highlight how we find ourselves in a transition period between two eras: the old era which relies on ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP), heavyweight corporate power and lawyers; against a new agile era based on crowdfunding and free access to information.

hollywoodreporter.com explains the situation:

“For decades, Paramount and CBS have tolerated and even encouraged fans of the Star Trek franchise to use their imagination at will, but on Tuesday the entertainment companies went to their battle stations and launched a legal missile at a production company touting the first independent Star Trek film.

Axanar, the subject of a lawsuit filed on Friday in California federal court, is no ordinary Star Trek film. The forthcoming feature film (preceded by a short film) is the source of more than $1 million in crowdfunding on Kickstarter and Indiegogo. The producers, led by Alec Peters, aim to make a studio-quality film. As the pitch to investors put it, “While some may call it a ‘fan film’ as we are not licensed by CBS, Axanar has professionals working in front and behind the camera, with a fully-professional crew — many of whom have worked on Star Trek itself — who ensure Axanar will be the quality of Star Trek that all fans want to see.”

Paramount and CBS see a violation of their intellectual property.

“The Axanar Works infringe Plaintiffs’ works by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes,” states the complaint.

Axanar has become one of the biggest film projects in Kickstarter history and has been nearing warp speed with the reported help of Star Trek actor George Takei. The film mines subject area referenced in the late 1960s Gene Roddenberry television series and appears to be a prequel.”

As mentioned, CBS/Paramount has previously turned a blind eye to fan films using the Star Trek mythology as long as they do not make any profit either from the film itself or from related merchandise.

The current state of affairs was complicated enough anyway, with the rights to the franchise being split between two separate corporations, and as explained here:

“A major stumbling block: “Star Trek’s” licensing and merchandising rights are spread over two media conglomerates with competing goals. The rights to the original television series from the 1960s remained with CBS after it split off from Paramount’s corporate parent Viacom in 2006, while the studio retained the rights to the film series. CBS also held onto the ability to create future “Star Trek” TV shows.

Paramount must license the “Star Trek” characters from CBS Consumer Products for film merchandising.”

So Axanar is entering an already fairly complicated universe with its proposed new movie. What seems to have awoken the CBS/Paramount interest in this film is the large amount of money raised from the crowdfunding campaigns, plus the fact that they have their own new ‘official’ ST film coming out in 2016.

So one question is: can a production still be described as ‘amateur’ or ‘fan’ when it has a budget of over $1 million, and is paying industry professionals to make it, even when it has stated that the film itself is a non-profit operation?

Granted, a million dollars is nothing compared to what the next ‘official’ Star Trek film will cost, but this brings us to the crux of the thing here: the cost of making ‘professional quality’ films has dropped enormously in recent years due to the increase in power of cheap personal computers and ‘prosumer’ CGI software. Add to this the power of the internet to publicise and raise the money via crowdfunding, and this looks like a very much more equal fight than could have been imagined a decade or so ago. This is not so much one David versus Goliath as a million distributed young Davids against one ageing Goliath.

So what do the big studios have in their favour? If everything else is more or less equal, it basically boils down to two letters: IP. These two letters hold the key to enormous corporate and state power. CBS/Paramount holds the ‘intellectual property’ rights and therefore can force the upstart production out of existence using the power of the US courts which will surely back its bid to reassert its sole right to exploit its ‘property’: that is, the collection of ideas and characters originated by Gene Roddenberry in the 1960s which have been added to constantly since then and now make up the Star Trek mythological universe.

Therefore unless the producers of Axanar can come to some sort of agreement with the rights holders, that will be the end of the story. But should it be? Or should they soon be able to do whatever they want with these ideas? As unpleasantfacts.com notes:

“This whole mess would be largely avoided if the Star Trek intellectual property was in the public domain. They’d still probably be making bad Star Trek movies, it just wouldn’t be as offensive when there were other options. Big studios wouldn’t be the only game in town when it comes to characters and a universe that has been part of people’s lives for many years.

If the 1909 Copyright act was still in effect, Star Trek would be in the public domain after 56 years. The original series first aired in 1966, so by 2022 the basics of the original Star Trek universe free to anyone who might be able to do it justice. Under current law, it is in the hands of the current rights holders until at least 2061 and likely longer since copyrights get extended when Mickey Mouse gets close to the public domain due to Disney’s lobbyists.”

Corporate capture of the legislative powers pretty much everywhere in the world means that franchises such as Star Trek are pretty much never going to enter the public domain, at least while this seriously broken system of copyright exists. As always, corporations proclaim themselves staunchly in favour of a free market until they themselves enjoy a monopoly.

In contrast, it doesn’t appear that the majority of the ‘IP’ related to Sherlock Holmes being in the public domain (although naturally even that is complicated) has harmed efforts to produce successful films and television series using the iconic detective as their main character – what has harmed them, if anything, is them simply not being very good.

Given that hardcore Star Trek fans are apparently disenchanted with the recent CBS/Paramount films and are putting their money where their mouth is by backing the new Axanar project, it may be that the lawsuit is revealing a previously unexperienced level of concern over fan-backed competition to their franchise. Imagine the embarrassment if the crowdsourced film got more views on YouTube than the mainstream one did at the cinema, with maybe one two-hundredth of the budget. Also if Axanar goes ahead, we can’t discount that the infamous ‘Streisand Effect‘ will in effect be granting free publicity to the project from now on.

Overall it does look likely that the corporate behemoths will win this battle, although Alec Peters, producer of Axanar, sounds hopeful that some sort of agreement can be reached. This does however point to a new front in the overall war between those who believe that long-running mythologies such as Star Trek should be effectively ‘open sourced’ into the public domain and who now have the power to create ‘professional quality’ retellings of them, and those who believe that ‘Intellectual Property’ is sacred and – at least for now – have the backing of the state to enforce it.

Connect with the author on twitter @guyjames23

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