Darren Sharp: How do you create a viable business or organization without a hierarchy?

Enspiral, an entrepreneurial collective based in Wellington, New Zealand, has been working to answer this question since 2010. Started as a group of individuals doing contract work together, the community quickly shifted to launching companies focused on making its ongoing experiments in self-organization accessible to a wider audience. Successful projects include Loomio, a worker-owned co-operative that developed an open source app for consensus decision-making.

Distributed leadership has been key to the success of Enspiral and thousands of other sharing, open source and peer-to -peer communities around the world that rely on participation and networked governance to achieve outcomes for the common good.

Alanna Irving, who contributed to Enspiral’s new book Better Work Together: How the Power of Community Can Transform Your Business, has co-founded multiple startups, including Loomio, Cobudget, Enspiral, and Dark Crystal. She currently works as executive director of the Open Source Collective. We caught up with Irving to learn more about bossless leadership and her practical advice for how groups can both share power and tap members’ strengths to drive personal and social transformation.

Darren Sharp: What’s the book’s core message?

Alanna Irving: Better Work Together doesn’t give you a formula to instantly make your organisation collaborative, flat, or purposeful — because there isn’t one. In this book, we share what we’ve learned by pushing the boundaries of the future of work in a network of social entrepreneurs called Enspiral.

It’s not a book of theory, but a field guide by and for practitioners. As is fitting for a book about non-hierarchical, peer-to-peer, distributed practices, these stories are told through many voices, in many forms, like essays, toolkits, illustrations, exercises, and even a bread recipe. Sharing the failures is as valuable as sharing the successes. The truth is organic, emergent, and human. You can’t tie it all up neatly with a bow on top, or claim that everything fits into a clever 4-quadrant diagram.

We want to offer what we have learned to others, so they can make it their own and take it even further. We’ve gathered up the best insights and transformational experiences we’ve had while growing companies, networks, and ourselves in pursuit of truly meaningful work. The core message is: Join us on the journey.

Why was Better Work Together developed, how are people using it, and what’s its impact so far?

We’re doers, often too busy doing to reflect and communicate. Enspiral has never been great at marketing itself. We’ve never been good at productising or selling what we do, because that’s never what it was about. But whenever bits of our story got out, in talks or blog posts or podcasts, people clambered for more.

I think there’s a lot of abstract theory out there about new paradigms for human group dynamics, but a lack of real, unvarnished, on the ground lived experience. People are hungry for it. The book is a way for us to bring some structure to analyzing and communicating the ideas, tools, and practices we’ve developed, and offering them to the world in an accessible format. It’s our way of recognizing that we’re part of a much bigger worldwide movement, away from top-down, command and control structures, toward bottom-up, consent-based, shared power. The book is our contribution to the larger collective discourse.

It’s been truly amazing to see people respond to the book all over the world, excitedly realising that they are far from alone in this work, and how much further we can go by sharing our stories. A lot of people are telling us they want to go deeper, so now we’re developing workshops and courses based on the book.

Your contribution to the book is largely about distributed leadership in groups. Can you share what that looks like using examples from your personal experience?

Some people think that rid of bosses means there’s no need for leadership. I think just the opposite: It means you need to grow the leadership capacity of everyone. Personally, it took me a long time to reclaim the notion of leadership, because I felt uncomfortable with all the baggage it carried from coercive power hierarchies.

There is a name for this thing I do, and it’s called leadership, but it’s not about bossing people around. Once I was able to uncouple leadership from positional authority, I began to see it purely as a force that moves human groups toward coordination and velocity and away from entropy. It became clear that leadership is not contained in a specific role, but can and should be distributed among many people and processes.

This led me to questions like “How do I develop as a leader when there’s no ladder to climb?” and “How can I increase overall leadership capacity in my network?” I developed a framework for understanding these ideas, which is in a section of the book called “How to Grow Distributed Leadership”, which builds up from the base of shared power and self-leadership through leading others, leading leaders, and ecosystem leadership.

The framework has definitely helped me think more consciously about my own development, and how to mentor others who are intentionally developing leadership capacity in their own networks.

You use archetypes or personas to describe different types of leadership which have their corresponding shadow aspects. How can people become aware of their shadow aspects and make the most of them in group situations?

One of the chapters I wrote in the book describes a leadership development framework I created called Full Circle Leadership. In my work at Enspiral, I noticed an eight-step life cycle projects went through, and saw how projects fell over or fizzled if they missed some steps.

It partly came out of my annoyance that, as a network, we were great at coming up with new ideas but not as good at taking them all the way to completion. I needed to get the word “operationalisation” into our collective vocabulary. I also saw other organisations with the opposite dynamic: great at maintaining but struggling to innovate.

In parallel, as an operational leader, I went through a process of developing empathy for visionary leaders, and came to understand that we weren’t at two opposite ends of a spectrum, but part of a circle. Each of the eight steps represents its own unique kind of leadership, all of which are valuable and important.

This became a lens to better appreciate and nurture diverse leadership strengths. Equally, it’s a lens for awareness of the shadow sides. I got better at seeing my own shadows as a leader, and seeing both the light and dark sides of my collaborators. This is why working alongside diverse, respected peer leaders, who are different to you, is so important.

How can groups leverage people’s strengths and also take team members out of their comfort zone to learn new skills?

This work asks a lot of us. There is no way to keep engaging deeply, purposefully, and vulnerably in community without a lot of self-development. Sometimes we call that The Work. It never ends because humans are dynamic, complex, living beings, and groups of humans even more so.

On one level, it means always being out of your comfort zone. On another level, it means gaining a profound sense of purpose, confidence in you abilities, and unambiguous commitment to guiding values that stay steady in the face of enormous change. It’s great if you can be responsibly and safely held and guided by someone who “knows what they’re doing”, but really, no one knows what they’re doing when you’re charting new territory and constantly experimenting. It can be risky. You need a lot of self awareness and excellent boundaries.

My seven or so [years] at Enspiral felt like a never-ending stream of intensive challenges and growth opportunities. I learned so much about myself, at the same time I was learning about startups, facilitation, building technology, social impact, money, and everything else. It was incredibly rich — and, frankly, exhausting. I miscalculated and burned out multiple times.

There’s a lot in the book about self care, well-being, group processes for looking after each other, and strategies for avoiding burnout when you’ve got a fiery passion in your heart. The risk and challenge are inherent, so I’d definitely encourage people to regularly reflect and check in about how it’s really going. But to me, there is no question that it’s worth it.

Power dynamics are an inevitable characteristic of human groups. What advice do you have for groups for making them more transparent? When does it make sense to share power and what steps can groups take to get there?

The first step is to practice talking about power dynamics openly, regardless of their shape. A healthy culture means being honest about power. If you are a hierarchy, admit it. Own it! Sometimes hierarchies are the right shape for what you’re trying to do. You can have consent-based, ethical hierarchies. A lot of people actually just want to be told what their job is.

Talking about power dynamics will allow you to collectively ask important questions, like “How is our structure working for us? Could it be improved?” Sometimes groups that aspire to less hierarchy will treat power like a taboo, and try to pretend it doesn’t exist. This will not result in shared power, only in implicit, unaccountable power.

Power dynamics are an inherent property of human groups. Your collective task is to take ownership of your group’s power dynamics and make them work for you. One frame I often use is “align power and responsibility.” If people have responsibility for things they don’t have power over, or are exerting power over things they aren’t taking responsibility for, you’ve got a problem.

Sometimes that’s about an internal emotional boundary around what you will feel responsible for. Sometimes it’s about restructuring roles to give power over their scope of responsibility. Sometimes it’s about calling out unacknowledged power. It’s a frame I find useful to examine in a lot of situations.

Finally, consider how our work on power in the context of human society overall [is] inextricably linked to social justice. We need to consider how power dynamics function at every level, from the macro to the micro, to truly understand them.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Darren Sharp | Twitter

Darren Sharp is a leading sharing economy strategist, consultant and researcher.  As founding Director of Social Surplus he develops strategy and facilitates capacity-building using strength-based approaches including asset-based community development,

The post What Enspiral can teach us about how to run a company with no boss appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Here’s how one organization is working on the problem: In 2009, Martine Postma organized the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam, Netherlands, to do something good for the environment and build social contacts within local communities. The Repair Café connected people who were skilled in fixing things with community members who needed items to be fixed once a month at a convenient neighborhood location. The repair experts shared their knowledge with the community members, who learned that repair is possible, and often not that difficult, with a little bit of community support. People got to experience firsthand the value of repairing things instead of buying new stuff to replace them.

Results:

• “There are now over 1,000 Repair Café groups operating in 25 countries around the world,” says Postma, founder of the Repair Café Foundation. “On average, groups meet once a month at which around 25 repairs are made with a 70 percent success rate. Eighteen thousand products are repaired each month under the Repair Café International umbrella, which equates to over 200,000 products per year. If one product weighs 1 kg [or 2.2 pounds], then Repair Café groups prevent 200,000 kgs [over 440,000 pounds/220 tons] of CO2 from being emitted each year.”
• At first, the Repair Café Foundation’s starter kit, which gives a blueprint on starting a repair café, was entirely free; but to keep the organization sustainable, the foundation needed to raise some income. The Starter Kit is now supplied via a webshop where it can be bought for a voluntary donation. Making this shift was a challenge for the foundation, but most people have been willing to pay a small sum for the kit. Organizations that promote volunteer activities need to maintain ongoing sources of revenue and the Starter Kit is a good way to cover some of the costs.
• The Repair Café Foundation has also developed close partnerships with organizations and companies that provide benefits like product discounts to local organizers and give yearly financial donations to the organization.

Learn more from:

• Repair Café Foundation

This case study is adapted from our latest book, “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” Get a copy today.

Photo by Darwin Bell

The post The Repair Café Foundation builds community by fixing things appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Darren Sharp: Commercial sharing platforms like Uber and Airbnb have reshaped the transportation and housing sectors in cities and raised challenges for urban policy makers seeking to balance market disruption with community protections. Transformational sharing projects like Shareable’s Sharing Cities Network seek to strengthen the urban commons to address social justice, equity, and sustainability. This article presents a summary of my recent journal paper “Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative Policy and Practice” for a special issue of Urban Policy and Research. In the paper I show how narrative framing of the sharing economy for community empowerment and grassroots mobilization have been used by Shareable to drive a “sharing transformation” and by Airbnb through “regulatory hacking” to influence urban policy.

Op-ed: The city has become an important battleground for the sharing economy as commercial platforms like Uber and Airbnb leverage network effects and urban clustering through two-sided marketplaces. This poses a range of complex urban policy challenges for governments, especially in relation to infrastructure planning, public transport, housing affordability, and inequality. These commercial sharing platforms continue to disrupt legacy services, raise tensions between private and public sector interests, intensify flexible labor practices, and put pressure on rental vacancy rates.

Bold experiments for transformative urbanism like the Sharing Cities Network, launched by Shareable in 2013, tell a new story about the sharing economy. This global network was created to inspire community advocates to self-organize across dozens of local nodes and run MapJams and ShareFests to make community assets more visible, help convene local actors, offer policy solutions to local governments, and re-frame the sharing economy’s potential to drive transformational urban change. At the same time, Sharing Cities have gained formal support from various municipal governments including Seoul and Amsterdam through policies and programs that leverage shared assets, infrastructure, and civic participation to create economic and social inclusion.

The narrative framing of the sharing economy by different actors plays an important role in shaping urban policy. The Sharing Cities Network has developed a narrative of the sharing economy as a transformational global movement founded on inclusive sharing and support for the urban commons to address social justice, equity, and sustainability. Airbnb claims to “democratize capitalism” to support the “middle class” in its story of the sharing economy and uses this to mobilize hosts to influence urban regulatory regimes amidst a growing backlash against commercial home sharing’s impact on housing affordability, racial discrimination and “corporate nullification,” or intentional violation of the law, arising from its business practices.

The Sharing Cities Network encourages local actors to organize face-to-face and online in multiple cities simultaneously and connects diverse stakeholders including individuals, community groups, sharing enterprises, and local governments. Yet the Sharing Cities Network remains open to co-optation and contestation from commercial sharing platforms with thousands of staff, millions of users, and sophisticated public policy coordination at their disposal.

The Sharing Cities Network emerged at a time when the commercial platform Airbnb was encountering widespread regulatory pushback from numerous city governments including Barcelona, New York, and Berlin. In 2013, Airbnb began using grassroots lobbying tactics through the industry-funded organization Peers that it co-founded and co-funded with other for-profit sharing economy companies. Peers used Airbnb hosts to lobby New York state lawmakers, with similar efforts taking place in other jurisdictions in coordinated attempts to modify hotel laws in favor of short-stays home sharing. Airbnb honed its experiments in mobilizing grassroots support in San Francisco where it funded a successful campaign to defeat the Board of Supervisors Proposition F ballot to, amongst other things, cap the number of nights a unit could be rented on shortstays platforms to a maximum of 75 nights per year. Airbnb spent over $8 million to defeat the ballot using a sophisticated blend of mixed media advertising, door knocking and host activation, as political organizer Nicole Derse from 50+1 Strategies who co-led the “No on F” campaign observes:

The campaign had all the modern bells and whistles you’d expect of an effort backed by a Silicon Valley giant. Still, we also ran one of the most aggressive field campaigns San Francisco has ever seen. Over the course of 11 weeks, our staff and volunteers knocked on more than 300,000 doors, made some 300,000 phone calls and had over 120,000 conversations with real voters. We got more than 2,000 small businesses to oppose Prop. F. In fact, our Airbnb hosts took the lead in this campaign, hosting house parties, organizing their friends and neighbors, and leading dozens of earned media events. 

These campaign tactics draw on social movement theorist Marshall Ganz’s “snowflake model” of distributed leadership and small-group community organizing that were used to great effect during former U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign. Washington DC-based startup incubator and seed fund 1776 have described Airbnb’s approach to defeat Proposition F in San Francisco as “regulatory hacking” — “a strategy combining public policy and alternatives to traditional marketing for startups to successfully scale in the next wave of the digital economy.” Chris Lehane, ex-aide to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, was hired by Airbnb to orchestrate the “No on F” campaign and give it the appearance of a grassroots effort that made hosts “the face of its defense.”

The Sharing Cities Network created the conditions for grassroots actors to demonstrate that another sharing economy grounded in cooperation, solidarity, and support for the urban commons was already underway through a “sharing transformation” in communities around the world. At the same time, Airbnb used “regulatory hacking,” political campaigning, and grassroots mobilization to remove policy blockages to commercial home sharing in key city markets to further its growth ambitions. The Sharing Cities Network succeeded in framing a new story about the sharing economy based on community empowerment that was co-opted by Airbnb’s Shared City narrative and its development of Home Sharing Clubs. These dynamics of “transformation and capture” are further explored in the new paper “Sharing Cities for Urban Transformation: Narrative Policy and Practice.”

Header photo by Timon Studler via Unsplash

The post New research explores a sharing economy based on ‘cooperation, solidarity, and support’ appeared first on P2P Foundation.

To read the full Vision and Pathways report (bringing together four years of research and engagement on how to rapidly cut southern Australian cities’ greenhouse gas emissions), click on the image below.

The post Two Action Pathways: Green Growth vs Commons Transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Australian cities need to reduce their emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change, potentially profoundly impacting our future lifestyles.

A fantastic new report by Dr Seona Candy, Kirsten Larsen and Jennifer Sheridan, University of Melbourne, following our own Commons Transition templates. They were assisted by our colleagues in the Commons Transiton Coalition (Australia) Jose Ramos and Darren Sharp. The following was originally published in the University of Melbourne’s Pursuit publication.

It’s 2040.

As you wake and look outside, things might not look hugely different to 2017 – there aren’t any hoverboards or sky highways – but Australian cities have managed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent.

And how your day unfolds will look very different depending on how we reached this point.

As you step outside some changes are obvious. Renewable energy is now everywhere. You pass bladeless wind turbines, and solar farms on city skyscapers. On your way, you walk through an urban farm and the concrete jungle is greener with roof and vertical gardens throughout the city. But you’ve had to make some concessions in terms of privacy and lifestyle.

So what’s changed? And how did we get here?

These are just some of the questions explored in the final report from the Visions and Pathways 2040 research project which looks at how we can rapidly reduce Australian cities’ emissions to avoid catastrophic climate change as we approach the end of what’s being called the ‘critical decade’.

WE’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY

The report finds that exactly how we achieve emissions reductions will have a profound impact on what life in Australia is like in the future. Many of the technologies required to get us to a greener future already exist – but what’s important is how we apply them and who drives the change.

Over the last four years, through research, workshops and engagement activities, the project has drawn on input from over 250 experts across industry, government, academia and civil society to determine how Australian cities could reach this goal. But also to design what these future cities might look like.

This group of experts came together because they can see Australia is not on track to achieve even its stated emissions reductions targets. These targets have been put in place by successive governments who have repeatedly weakened the numbers and the criteria – and still we cannot meet them.

Since the removal of the carbon price, Australia’s emissions have started to increase again. We are going the wrong way.

The Australian political context means the multitude of technical pathways are clear, but the cultural, political and economic pathways are not. The Action Pathways in our report consider the forces of change that might be required to achieve the drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions we seek.

Many of the technologies required to get us to a greener future already exists. Picture: Amy Bracks/VEIL 2015

But how do we trigger political changes of this magnitude, and what is our own potential power in progressing these?

TWO PATHWAYS

The team designed two scenarios to demonstrate these positive outcomes – ‘Green Growth’ and a ‘Commons Transition’.

The first Green Growth scenario points to the role city governments, driven by community and stakeholder action, can play in discouraging organisations and businesses that are not explicitly and proactively decarbonising. This social and political mobilisation could help drive out the complicit acceptance and corruption preventing rapid reduction in fossil fuel use and development.

The Commons Transition scenario paints a new picture that re-empowers the citizen movement already evident in sweeping social changes in cities around the world. It draws on leading innovations in sharing and shareable cities; peer-to-peer, Open Design Distributed Manufacturing, cooperatives and platform cooperative movements, as well as some new, more radical cultural, political and economic initiatives.

These new movements are already gaining momentum. Citizen groups in countries like Spain, Iceland, Taiwan, Korea and Italy have not just challenged power, but also forged new political contracts that place citizens at the centre of city decision-making.

To ensure future cities achieve the necessary emissions reductions, we modelled them using the CSIRO-developed Australian Stocks and Flows Framework, which factors in not just for cities as they stand in 2040, but also the pathway that might get us there.

CONSUMING AND EMITTING

We took a consumption-based approach including both direct and indirect emissions. Direct emissions, like your car’s exhaust or burning gas to heat your house, occur within city boundaries. Indirect or embodied emissions are associated with the production of goods and services that support our urban lifestyles but are usually generated outside the city, like food, household appliances and electricity.

According to our research, direct emissions make up around 16 per cent of overall city emissions, equivalent to 52 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2013.

Changes to urban lifestyles like more active transport, reducing landfill waste, switching to electric transport coupled with clean electricity generation, as well as improving the design of our buildings, results in a reduction of these direct emissions of around 60 per cent by 2040 for both pathways.

The results indicate, though, that the majority of emissions related to a city lifestyle are produced outside city boundaries. Electricity generation contributes almost 50 per cent of the carbon footprint of southern Australian cities, with heavy industry and agriculture contributing around 12 per cent and 9 per cent respectively.

To significantly reduce city emissions, our report shows the accelerated replacement of fossil fuel power stations with 100 per cent clean generation technologies must be a priority. There’s also an urgent need to reduce heavy industry and agricultural production through recycling, lowering consumption of red meat and reducing exports, which account for the majority of indirect emissions in these sectors.

Changes to urban lifestyles like more active transport and switching to electric cars will have an impact. Picture: Amy Bracks/VEIL 2015

To achieve overall emissions reductions of 80 per cent by 2040 and in the critical short term, we also need to switch from forest clearing to forest preservation and regeneration, and rapidly increase other land uses that can sequester carbon (capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide) like agricultural production systems and urban forestry.

IMAGINING A GREENER FUTURE

Emissions reductions of this scale can be achieved, but will require – and drive – massive transformation of our cities and even our societies, economies and politics.

Importantly, the report emphasises the important role of cities as cultural and political leaders – understanding, supporting and demanding change in production sectors and land-use outside the cities – as well as making the changes needed themselves.

The need for early and radical changes to land-use and management for carbon sequestration to ‘buy time’ for structural change, points to a critical role city dwellers can play as consumers of forestry, agricultural and food products, as well as directly in urban forestry.

To believe that these scenarios and action pathways are possible, any of them – let alone the ones we actually want – requires a leap of imagination. To make them possible requires a corresponding leap of determination.

The Visions and Pathways 2040 project challenges all of us – leaders and citizens alike – to be determined and prioritise reducing emissions before it’s too late, and points to the pathways that might just be able to get us there.

The project was led by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne, and included researchers from Swinburne University and University of New South Wales. It was funded by the Australian Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living. Download the report from the Visions and Pathways 2040 website.

Photo by RW Sinclair

The post A vision of the Urban Commons Transition for 2040 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Darren Sharp: A new research report and engagement project explores how Australian cities can achieve rapid decarbonization and increased resilience in the face of climate change. The report, “Visions and Pathways 2040: Scenarios and Pathways to Low Carbon Living,” was led by the Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab at the University of Melbourne and funded by the CRC for Low Carbon Living. It describes two pathways for cities — Commons Transition and Green Growth — to achieve drastic greenhouse gas emissions reductions. The report paints a new narrative with re-empowered citizens at the vanguard of sweeping social changes already underway in cities around the world.

The vision for the Commons Transition pathway includes rapidly reducing consumption and shifting power structures to democratic and participative communities. The pathway to accomplish this vision, the report states, is for “citizens and communities to create and apply new ways of providing for themselves, building sophistication in how they manage these systems for the common good as peers. Governance and institutions adapt and evolve to operate as a ‘Partner State’ facilitating commons management.”

The Commons Transition Action Pathway attempts to imagine how a post-growth social model might work. How might people live with sufficiency? This pathway suggests that universal access to basic assets like housing and food, and open design distributed manufacturing, provide some answers. The importance of technology in the pathway relates to how successfully cooperative ownership models can be deployed to provide alternatives to platform monopolies like Uber, TaskRabbit, and Airbnb, which leverage data commodification, value extraction, and precarious labor through rent-seeking business models. The technology stack of this scenario rests on data sovereignty, commons-based peer production, and platform cooperativism which provide the elements for an ethical alternative to platform monopolies.

The Green Growth Action pathway explores how political changes of the required magnitude might be triggered by action in cities, within the current economic and political framework. The vision, as outlined in the report, is to ensure “the right policies are in place to incentivize corporate innovation for rapid decarbonization — government and business working together, within the current economic and neoliberal paradigm.” The pathway is for cities to lead, building political pressure to drive changes to state and national policy.

These emerging narratives and movements demonstrate that citizen-led solutions to city challenges along with democratic forms of community ownership and co-governance can drive actions to achieve sustainable urban transformation.

Jose Ramos and I co-wrote the “Commons Transition Action Pathway” drawing on the work of Michel Bauwens, Peer to Peer Foundation, Commons Transiton, Shareable’s “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” urban commons scholars Sheila Foster and Christian Iaione, as well as open design distributed manufacturing, platform cooperatives, and municipalist coalitions taking shape across Europe. Thanks to the report project leadership team: Kirsten Larsen, Seona Candy, Jennifer Sheridan and Chris Ryan. The project has developed tools to facilitate use of these scenarios for individuals and organizations. 

The post New Report Outlines How Australian Cities Can Achieve Climate Resilience appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” Link Mega-List

With November’s event come and gone, we have assembled a list of some of the articles and media resulting from “ Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet.” We want to thank everyone in attendance — in person and watching via live stream — for their dedication and passion. For those of you who did not get a chance to attend, we encourage you to check out the materials linked below which include post-conference write-ups, live coverage, image galleries, and archived recordings of every lecture given at the event.

Articles

• Writeup by Darren Sharp (@dasharp), including the launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
  
• Event highlights by Jonas Algers (@JonasAlgers)
• Enric Senabre (@esenabre) and Ricard Espelt (@ricardespelt) offer a summary of approaches to the design and development of platform cooperatives with a focus on the final day’s “unconference”
  
• Live coverage by Dorothy Howard (@DorothyR_Howard), reporting for e-Flux, with a host of links mentioned by different speakers
  
• Discussion of the conference and a collection of passages from important texts about platform cooperativism by Ewen Chardronnet (@ewenchardronnet) in English and French
  
• A published transcript of the talk by Wolfgang Kowalsky (@kokowo1) mounting a critique of platform capitalism
  
• The conference experience of Peter Bosmans (@febecoop), Febecoop, Belgium (Dutch)
  

Media

• All recorded footage, filmed by the Internet Society, can be found on the Internet Archive. You can also download a torrent file of all video files. These recordings also remain on the Internet Society’s Livestream channel where they were first broadcast.
  
• Collection of photos on Flickr
  
• Images posted to Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference
• Radio feature about the event by Deutschlandfunk produced by Patrick Stegemann (@petterich) (in German)
• All image tweets and text tweets made on Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference

Selected Presentations

Green Taxi

Jason Weiner of Colorado Cooperative Developers discusses the success of Green Taxi Cooperative, a new union taxicab cooperative in the Denver/Boulder metro area. The company’s app has the convenience and functionality of its venture-capital backed competitors, shares 100% ownership among its members, and is now the second largest worker cooperative in the country.

The Union-Coop Model

This panel, moderated by Trebor Scholz, featured speakers from a number of different unions: Palak Shah of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Dawn Gearhart of Teamsters Local 117, Lieza Dessein and Frisia Donders of SMart Coop, Annette Mühlberg of United Services Union in Berlin, Michael Peck of 1worker1vote.org and Mondragon, and Christian Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. They discussed the union-coop model and the challenges it will have to overcome to succeed.

Towards an Open Social Economy

In this talk, Yochai Benkler elaborates the economic conditions that have resulted in a crisis for democratic capitalism. Arguing that recent far-right populism is a response to an oligarchic capitalism which was born in the 1970s, Benkler claims that platform cooperatives have the potential to be a core component of an alternative, left-wing trajectory into a market economy re-embedded with social relations. He stresses the importance of winning an ideological war in this time of uncertainty, not on paper but through real-world organizations engaging in cooperative social production.

The Digital Democracy Manifesto

A cheeky and informative talk by Richard Barbrook discussing the path to the inclusion of platform cooperatives as a key point in the Digital Democracy Manifesto proposed by UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

MIDATA.coop

In his short presentation Ulrich Genicke introduced MIDATA.coop, a project that enables citizens to securely store, manage and control access to their personal data by helping them to establish and own national/regional not-for-profit MIDATA cooperatives. MIDATA’s initial focus will be on health related data since these are most sensitive and valuable for one’s personal health. MIDATA cooperatives act as the fiduciaries of their members’ data. As MIDATA members, citizens can visualize and analyze their personal data.

There were so many remarkable talks; these is merely a small selection. Here are a few more talks

• Thomas Doennebrink’s report from Berlin and Mexico City
• Nathan Schneider Interviews Professor Esther N. Gicheru
• Mayo Forell Fuster

The post Looking back on “Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(14 mins) Darren Sharp – Australia is in the midst of a transition from an extractive economy led by the mining and agricultural sectors, towards a knowledge-based service economy. While digital innovation and startups are lauded for their ability to create jobs and stimulate the new economy, an extractive logic which privileges individual reward over mutual benefit remains dominant. Platform co-operatives provide an ethical bridge to the new economy through collective ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms to keep wealth and decision-making in the hands of value creators. Australia is home to a nascent cooperative platform ecosystem comprised of networks like the Commons Transition Coalition and enterprises including AbilityMate, AnyShare, bHive Bendigo, Geddup, Open Food Network and YLab. These system entrepreneurs and organizations are working in partnership with the communities they serve to bring an equitable and inclusive new economy to life.

Photo by Marko Mikkonen

The post Darren Sharp on the Emerging Ecosystem of Platform Cooperativism in Australia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Venue: Church of All Nations (CAN), 180 Palmerston St, Carlton.

Date: Friday 10th June 2-5pm

Cost: $15 Full / $10 Concession/Student/Unwaged

NOTE: Attendees of the Platform Cooperativism – How to make the ‘Uber’ economy work for people seminar are able to attend this workshop at no cost (please bring along your ticket from that event to redeem this offer).

Peer to peer platforms have opened up great potential for meeting human needs in knowledge, science, culture and enterprise. Yet the last decade has seen much of the sharing economy co-opted by vested interests, businesses intent on extracting value from local communities by owning what we produce, or controlling the platforms that we increasingly rely on for work, food, transport and housing.

Communities are at a crossroads, the outcome of which depends on the choices each of us make as users, producers and consumers of platform services like Uber, Airbnb and Airtasker. We can continue down the road of business as usual, with a widening gap between haves and have nots, owners and producers, or we can begin to envision, design and develop community and worker-owned platform co-operatives and generative systems of value creation that serve the common good.

The latter we call the ‘Commons Economy’ and it is being built from the ground up by social entrepreneurs, advocates, scholars, innovators and activists from around the world. Creating this future is not a given, it is open ended and relies on each of us to play a part.

The Commons Transition Coalition invites you to this special event with international guest Nathan Schneider (US), co-convenor of the first ‘platform cooperativism’ conference (NYC), and a panel of local innovators to discover together how the commons economy is taking shape.

The second half of this event will be a Design Lab with AbilityMate to workshop ideas in development and seek feedback from fellow social enterprise practitioners.

International Speaker

Nathan Schneider is a scholar in residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a journalist who writes about economy, technology, and religion. He is the author of two books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at the New School. Follow his work on Twitter at @nathanairplane or on his website, TheRowBoat.com.

Panel Speakers

Serenity Hill is co-founder of the Open Food Network which provides online infrastructure for communities to co-create decentralised, transparent and sustainable food systems.

Eric Doriean is a co-founder and COO of AnyShare. AnyShare empowers sharing economy ventures and is the world’s first Internet based FairShares multi-stakeholder cooperative.

Antony McMullen works for Employee Ownership Australia and New Zealand, Catholic Social Services Victoria and Church of All Nations in member development, policy and communication areas.

Facilitators

Darren Sharp is the Director of Social Surplus, the Australian editor of Shareable and Melbourne Coordinator of the Sharing Cities Network.

José Ramos is the Director of Action Foresight, Research Fellow at Victoria University, and senior editor for the Journal of Futures Studies.

Design Lab

AbilityMate is a for-purpose movement co-founded by Melissa Fuller and Johan du Plessis who design and manufacture affordable Assistive Technology products with people who have disabilities. They create fully certified, high quality, open-source designs which are then 3D printed and assembled all around the world.

A limited number of bursary tickets are available. Please contact the organisers for more information.

When: Friday, June 10, 2016 from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM (AEST)

Where: Church of All Nations – 180 Palmerston Street, Carlton, VIC 3053, Australia – View Map“

The post Sharing Value & Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This expert consultation on “The Digital Economy: Potential for Disruptive Contributions to Urban Decarbonisation and Resilience” was organised as part of the Visions and Pathways 2040 project.

Digital Economy Consultation Report by P2P Foundation

Photo by xdxd_vs_xdxd

The post The Digital Economy: Two Models of Peer-to-Peer Value Generation appeared first on P2P Foundation.