Co-op leaders, students, researchers, programmers, open source activists, and freelancers from various sectors came to the CUHK campus in the hills above Hong Kong, a short train ride from Shenzhen. During the conference, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium Hong Kong was launched with its own website, as was a new Chinese-language book on platform co-ops entitled 平台點合作.

There were several reasons for bringing the event to Hong Kong this year.

As platform cooperativism expands, we need to develop our thinking and practices also outside of a European and Anglo-American context. Countries like Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan all have vibrant co-op communities and long histories of mutual aid. Platform co-ops can and should learn from these diverse contexts. With 60% of the world’s population living in Asia, and with significant social and political challenges in the years ahead, the co-operative digital economy has the potential to make a significant impact on a number of pressing issues. From how to care for an ageing population, a growing number of refugees, worsening economic inequality, and the growth of the informal economy, platform co-ops and our Platform Coop Development Kit can improve the conditions and rights of workers, and help answer these challenges.

This year’s event used the agrarian metaphor of “sowing the seeds” to explore how platform cooperativism – and its key principles of broad-based platform ownership, democratic governance, open source, and co-design — can take root in Asia.

Participants heard from a range of co-operative entrepreneurs, scholars, activists, and hackers who shared their insights on everything from platforms used by rural co-ops in Taiwan to new developments in peer-to-peer licensing.

Conference conveners Jack Qui, Terence Yuen, and Trebor Scholz led panels that forged connections between diverse topics, from the use of blockchain technologies for refugee co-ops to considering new pathways for platform co-ops in Asia.

On the first day of the conference we focused on resources and organisations emerging across south-east Asia. Representing the Japanese Cooperative Alliance, Osamu Nakano documented the growth of the co-op movement in Japan which now counts 65 million members. Nakano emphasized the long term commitment of Japanese worker co-ops to platform cooperativism.

Namya Mahajan, managing director of the Federated Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa) in India, spoke about how Sewa supports more than 106 co-ops with a membership of more than 300,000. Mahajan outlined the “Sewa Way” and its unique approach to organising informal workers through a hybrid union and co-op model. She also reported how the collaboration with the Platform Co-op Development Kit had started.

Participants learned about the Smangus Aboriginal Community Labor Co-op in Taiwan, which was the subject of a recent Peabody Award-winning documentary, and its unique ability to motivate their young to stay and work for the co-op instead of moving to the city. Presenters also discussed the critical work of the Nangtang farming co-op in mainland China and the Alliance of Taiwan Foodbanks in Taiwan. All three groups participated in a hackathon in the days prior to the conference, prototyping new digital platforms for their organisations. Project ideas were based on Smangus’s need for a new platform to organise their recent surge of eco-tourists and the Taiwanese Foodbank’s need for a better digital platform that could improve the efficiency of receiving and disbursing food donations.

From South Korea, Changbok You showcased Sungmisan, an inspiring urban village in Seoul that offers residents a variety of co-operative living practices to combat inequality and social fragmentation.

Indonesian entrepreneur Henri Kasyfi discussed a new co-operative platform that can facilitate payment by facial recognition technology, specifically helping street merchants and the country’s poorest businesses. Also discussing new hardware possibilities, David Li, who founded the first Maker Lab in China, spoke about the possibilities for tech development in Shenzhen. With the Chinese city’s rapid rise as an industrial center for tech production, many formerly expensive commercial products can now be produced at astonishingly low prices. His lecture sparked a discussion about the potential for a new co-operative phone or co-operative hardware to be distributed by large co-ops. It also raised concerns about the social and ecological costs of such low-cost production.

As part of her spirited presentation, Gigi Lo showcased her project Translate for Her, which supports ethnic minority women living in Hong Kong who cannot read Chinese. Translate for Her allows these women to complete daily tasks like signing a lease for an apartment, or understanding their children’s report cards. The Singing Cicadas group, a small Hong-Kong-based production company of film-makers, writers, and illustrators focused on social justice storytelling, presented their decision to become a co-op.

Renowned sociologist Pun Ngai, co-author of Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers, argued that China’s revolution of 1949 is still unfinished – and that it now must challenge class conflicts within the global capitalist system. The challenge for platform cooperativism in Hong Kong, she argued, is to not become an empty slogan but to turn it into “a social movement embedded in real struggles”.

Trebor Scholz at the conference

Later, as a counterweight to some of these arguments, Melina Morrison, CEO of the Australian Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals, spoke about the strong state of the co-op movement and how it continues to grow and employ more workers, both in Australia and around the world.

Michel Bauwens argued that the rise of blockchain technology is being used to create a world where community and trust are absent. Bauwens imagines a post-blockchain world where – somewhere in the force field between public benefit and profits – platform co-ops and protocolary co-ops, as well as other organisational forms, could thrive.

Huang Sun-Quan, director of the Institute of Network Society at the China Academy of Art, discussed the unique coding and design dimensions of platform co-ops, arguing against “digital gentrification” in which only the rich members of communities benefit from technological developments.

The day concluded with a panel exploring platforms that use co-operative thinking for design and implementation. Jack Qiu calls them “amphibious platforms.” Although not formally platform co-ops, by attending the conference these groups can consider ways to integrate platform co-op principles into their work.

Panelists included Hong Kong entrepreneur Albert Liu who is developing a new ride-sharing programme for the city, and Jessamine Pacis from the Foundation for Media Alternatives in the Philippines. Pacis’ work focuses on the rapid growth of in-home cleaning services, which leaves workers rights in a grey area without clear legal protections. Platform co-ops are a workable, clear alternative. Ali Ercan presented his work on Needs Map based in Turkey, which directly connects people willing to make in-kind contributions with neighbours who have matching material or volunteer needs.

And panelist Nashin Mahtani, representing the PetaBencana group in Indonesia, outlined how their platform uses real-time information to deal with floods and urban disasters. With some of the highest concentrations of social media users in the world, Indonesians are constantly tweeting and posting about flooding. PetaBencana transforms this data into actionable information by hijacking it from social media platforms through an open source technology called Cognicity, and posts it to an open and accessible online map to give citizens up-to-date information on flooding.

Day 2 of the conference focused on how platform co-ops are emerging around the world, and how everyday users can democratically own and operate platforms regardless of their location.

Trebor Scholz opened the day by bringing greetings from a group of 45 taxi co-op leaders in Brazil, with whom he had just met. Trebor provided an update and analysis of the movement, explaining that the co-operative digital economy looks different from country to country. Over the past year, co-ops generally have continued to gain some momentum. New platform co-ops are popping up in new industries continuously. Through the Platform Co-op Development Kit, the New School team and developers from the Inclusive Design Research Centre will jump-start burgeoning platform co-ops and create a new online hub, sharing resources and facilitating learning. Learn more about this work here and write to [email protected] if you can think of ways in which you want to get involved in your country.

Participants from around the world followed, giving short updates on their projects.

Felix Weth of Fairmondo.de in Germany discussed his experience setting up a co-operatively run online marketplace. It was challenging: he had to learn to emphasise, and even prioritise, a sustainable co-operative business model first, which would enable the social benefits of the co-op model. Sharetribe co-founder and CEO Juho Makkonen called for a diversified digital economy and discussed how his company focuses on convenient platform hosting, so that anyone can start an online labour or market platform in a short period of time.

From France, Edith Darren presented on CoopCycle, an open source platform co-op focused on helping bicycle delivery workers become owners of their own food delivery platforms. Edith and her colleagues had attended the New York City conference in 2017 with just a nascent idea in mind. They proudly presented at this year’s event to show their progress, giving thanks to the numerous connections, insights, and encouragement from the previous conference.

Geddup.com, based in Australia, is a community action platform for trade unions, co-operatives, and schools that is currently converting to a platform co-op. Geddup allows groups to organise events, recruit volunteers, undertake votes, and gather feedback online. Co-founder Rohan Clarke outlined how co-operatives and social organisations can communicate better, maximise responses, and reward progress through the platform. Rohan also shared great notes from his experience at the 2018 conference which you can read here.

Danny Spitzberg from CoLab Co-op shared out results from the co-opathon, and updated participants on two of CoLab’s current projects. The first is helping to develop a cleaning co-operative called Up&Go in New York City, and the second is establishing a temporary staffing service called Core Staffing in Baltimore. Core Staffing is owned and operated by returning citizens, or previously incarcerated individuals.

Stephen Gill presented on CoopExchange, “the world’s first crypto exchange dedicated to buying and selling co-operative tokens”. Check out more videos about this work and follow the launch of their app on Twitter.

Swedish union leader Fredrik Söderqvist shared updates from Unionen, Sweden’s largest union, which organises private sector, white collar professionals into unions. In recent years, Unionen’s work has focused on standardising contracts for digital enterprises, and helping emerging platform co-ops and unions create new labour contracts and standardised regulations. From Smart.coop in Belgium, Lieza Dessein discussed the 20-year history and success of their mutual risk platform co-operative, which focuses on protecting freelancers against wage theft and late payment while also offering social benefits and co-working spaces. Freelancers become employees of SMart.coop and then share resources like accountants and lawyers, but continue to work independently as artists, writers, and digital creatives. Through their online platform, SMart.coop scaled significantly and now serves more than 85,000 members across Europe.

Next, a roundtable discussion focused on how blockchain technology could scale and reshape platform co-ops. Panel chair Jeff Xiong and Trebor Scholz asked the panelists to explore several key questions. These included how, beyond all the hype, blockchain can in fact facilitate better business practices – and what it can do right now. Panelists explored if and how blockchain can scale, and how to overcome problems with ecological sustainability. Tat Lam, for example, reported about his fascinating work assisting refugees with blockchain-supported identities. One of China’s first bloggers, Isaac Mao, discussed the use of blockchain technology for music.

Jack Qiu concluded day 2 by circling back to the theme of “Sowing the Seeds”. Through presentations, conversations, panels and group discussions, participants helped plant new seeds for the co-op movement in Asia and around the world. Though some of this nurturing and growth may be going on underneath the ground, and not readily apparent, the work continues to expand, creating a new network of roots and a new ecosystem. How quickly and intensely this ecosystem will flourish depends on the continued dedication of organisers, researchers, co-operative workers, and on additional support from traditional co-ops and philanthropic VCs stepping up to nurture this work.

Through the conference, practitioners and activists across Asia were able to share ideas, and plot a co-operative future of work. In this way, the event meaningfully showcased the diversity, open-endedness, and exploratory nature of many co-ops emerging in the region. Critical thinking and inspirational imagining of possible futures was balanced with real-world, on-the-ground examples of co-operatives and technologies succeeding right now.

But participants agreed that larger, traditional co-operatives need to do more to help nascent platform co-ops develop. Many debated and discussed how large-scale co-op federations and enterprises can do more to serve the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Others asked how co-operatives can spread worker ownership and workplace democracy also throughout the supply chains that they rely on. Cognisant of the need to take formal steps to address these issues themselves, Platform Cooperativism Consortium members agreed that platform co-ops should work towards adopting a form of certification such as that by the Fairwork Foundation, to ensure that workers’ rights are protected.

As we look ahead to 2019, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is excited to mark the ten-year anniversary of digital labor conferences at The New School. Please save the date for our annual conference next year to be held on November 7-9, 2019 at The New School in New York City.

See a photo album of the event here.

New to this work? Click here to learn more about the growing and global platform co-op movement.

The post The Platform co-op movement gathers in Hong Kong for its global conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ana Manzanedo and her colleague Alícia Trepat have documented a set of practices that platform coops are setting in order to solve the downside of platforms. The first outcome of these practices is to set fairness distribution of risk and value generated by the platform activity. In that sense, it is not only that assuming risk is rewarded, but also that the consequences of bad decisions or actions affect those that made them (what Taleb calls having “skin in the game”: he or she who wants a share of the benefits needs to also share some of the risks). The second outcome of the practices is that it establishes the responsibility for the care of all those involved in the platform, which means that their vulnerabilities are covered so the reproduction of the activity of the platform is assured, even beyond the nowadays generation who carries it. We could call that having “skin in the care”.

The real world examples captured by Ana and Alicia reflect the insight explained in this previous post: that solutions for communities having thick relationships do not scale for communities with thin relationships. In fact, in the first kind of communities, emerge a behavior hardly seen in the second: voluntary risk-taking for others, which Taleb calls “soul in the game”. Accordingly, it is not unusual to see voluntary care-taking for others, which we could call “soul in the care”.

The desirable governance of a Platform Coop is the one that promotes skin/soul in the game/care:

Table 1: Desirable approach for risk and care management

Communities of peers have their own ways to avoid risk and care transfer, particularly between their members. Most of the practices described by Ana and Alicia fall in at least one of the following approaches:

Table 2: Peer’s communities approaches to avoid transfer of risk and care

Platform Coops are, like the rest of the platforms, trapped by the “law of power” and by “winner-takes-it-all” dynamics. Yet, departing from the new possibilities offered by technological progress and societal change, we know where the solution might be:

a) Opening and commoning knowledge and resources as much as possible, in order to promote diversity of players and non-monopolistic (rent-free) markets: showing that Platform Coops do not maximize self-interest, and that abundance is possible through cooperation. Attracting individuals and communities with soul in the game and making them interact to create new subjectivities.

b) Making decision-making as much distributed as possible in the communities of life (clubs, neighborhoods, etc.) that are affected by the decision, and in the communities of production (i.e. foundations, coops, etc.) working in a federated way, according to their proved competences. Involving communities with skin in the game, and letting them jump in the logic of the soul in the game.

That, of course, draws a completely different network dynamics, and therefore, a different governance. Here it is my proposal to rethink Platform Cooperativism as Platform Ecoopsystems, (a sort of mix of Platform Cooperativism and Open Cooperativism).

1. Platforms should not be conceived as monolithic architectures owned and managed in a centralized way. They should be conceived as ecosystems, or we will be trapped in the same logic from which we want to escape.

The only reason why platforms are monolithic is because it is the way in which value can be easily extracted in a centralized manner. It is true that some of them offer API’s to third party developers (i.e. Facebook) as long as those development supports their extractive business models. Platform Ecoopsystems, instead, should think in terms of distributed architectures. I suspect that, too often, p2p and sharing initiatives are secretly pervaded by the darling image of the individual entrepreneur, because the tools and practices used are adapted from those of the traditional rent-seeking economy, instead of being created from scratch.

2. There is no technological obstacle to design Platforms with distributed architectures. Let’s do it in order to promote ecosystems.

Once the extractive business model motivation is removed, there is no technological reason to prefer a centralized architecture. Resources are usually already distributed, infrastructures can be distributed, and platforms themselves can be distributed. Although blockchain is the new kid on the block, torrent technologies should not be discarded.

Table 3: Key Differences in Centralized and Decentralized Systems across the layers – taken from the Platform Design Toolkit Whitepaper:

3. Platforms must be organically built as ecosystems in which sustainability is reached by a combination of federation of communities that are trusted for making certain decisions, and market coordination.

What would happen if we think of Platforms more like an Open Source Operation System (such as Ubuntu) than as an App? What are the decisions to be made?

Table 4: Approach to Platform Decisions

The key is to minimize the decisions that must be decided by voting to those decisions where scarcity is real, through:

• Opening, opening, opening.

• Designing in such a way that financial value is distributed through free-rent markets.

• Delegating decisions to trusted participants that excel in the required competencies to perform their duty.

• If a gatekeeper is unavoidable, then it should be non-profit that distribute value as in rent-free market, assuring the financial sustainability of all participants. In other words, if there is a “cut” that can be captured because of intermediation, it has to be distributed in such way that risk and care is not transferred (see – again – Ana and Alícia for IFTF on positive platforms).

4. The kernel of a Platform Ecosystem should be a non-profit

Depending on the nature of the activity and business model, the initiators and promoters of a Platform Ecoopsystem should not be organized as a cooperative itself, but as a non-profit organization that acts as a sort of kernel of the ecosystem. It could be formed by a group of future stakeholders of the platform that distribute their contribution according to the competencies in which they are publicly recognized. This organization should a) create the initial conditions for the ecosystem flourishing and b) maintain the conditions for its sustainability as a positive platform, that compensate differently to participants according to their contribution and the stage of the project. (For instance, in the early stages, gamification might be used in order to distribute value to those that make the app/platform more viral in order to solve the chicken egg problem.

You may think that how this kernel operates is the actual key of the whole post, and maybe it is, but I prefer to just outline some intuitions about it, and maybe develop the idea in a future post, or just with a conversation in the comments of this post:

• It should release a first version of the infrastructure/platform open source software (code also could be sponsored by future stakeholders of the ecoopsystem).

• It should put in place the right mechanisms for distributing the value.

• It should organize the consultations to stakeholders.

• It should choose providers of the ecosystem, whenever that decision must be taken in a centralized way.

• It should serve as arbitrator of stakeholders’ disputes.

If value must be centralized because of some unavoidable design reason, an instantly updated and transparent accounting must be available, in which is visually clear how the value (compare with average industry) is distributed in the co-owned platform. Let the community be able to deliberate and vote periodically on how the value should be distributed.

5. Platform Ecoopsystems should leverage their two distinctive features in order to outcompete existing platforms: they do not have to create artificial scarcity, and they do not have to centralize value capture.

The ultimate competitive advantage of Platform Ecosystems is that user experience and value are not conditioned by artificial scarcity of features and services, which only purpose is to keep rent-seeking practices. In that sense, Platform Ecoopsystems do have an important business advantage, for they can better suit the needs and requirements of its users.

6. In the same way that FLOSS created their own array legal license options, Platform Ecoopsystems should create their own array of legal ownership options.

New legal agreements of property and decision-making should be explored, in order to dynamically evolve according to the needs of the Ecoopsystem. These agreements should offer different modalities of ownership and decision-making in which participants can be automatically positioned according to predefined parameters.

I have sketched here some canvases that reflect the ideas exposed above, and that could complement others toolboxes, such as Simone Cicero’s Toolkit or Platoniq’s Moving Communities Methodology.

Download the following canvases:

• The Ecoopsystem Idea Tester (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Exploration (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Sustainability Matrix (draft)

The post Platform Coop’s Governance (II): From Coop Platforms to Platform Ecoopsystems appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Three problems of Platform Coops

Firstly, Platform Coops do not promote enough the new interesting subjectivities and relationships responsible for the emerging collaborating, sharing, commoning and p2p dynamics that are proving to be transformational. It is precisely because they are built over the already consolidated thin self-interest-driven-relationships that rule our world since the modern era. In short, they are reinforcing those relationships by giving them new ways to exist. Think, instead, about my meeting with Ana Manzanedo. She is a Ouishare Connector in Barcelona that contacted me right after I started blogging about common matters of concern. In our first meeting we shared not only our personal whereabouts but also kind of coached/mentored each other and shared specific knowledge and ideas in order to help each other to create value in the present, and also prepare the field (invitation to a community of practices, etc.) for eventually creating open value together in the near future. It is not that we were not also looking out for our own interest, but we were both ready to give more than what we were taking, now or in the future. She is not, in that sense, the average kind of relationship I have in my business activity, but sure is the one I am looking for. Building a Platform Coops that does not promote connectors, urban entrepreneurs, open makers, technopolitical citizens or technopolitical civil servants or technopolitical representatives, (and so on) will have a much narrow impact than collectives such as Enspiral, Ouishare, Las Indias Electrónicas, etc. which have this generativity of new disrupting subjectivities (Ouishare considers itself above any other thing “an incubator of people; Las Indias offer different ways to experience with them how to live in abundance as communards; etc.) Out of its members, a Platform Coop only promotes a “responsible consumer” subjectivity using more or less the same approach as their non-peer managed rival organizations. I am in favor of such Platforms Coops in the same way I am for any kind of Coop. However, it remains obscure to me in what sense they will be able to compete and outperform non Coop Platforms. Hence the call for the intervention of governments in terms of regulatory frameworks and financial support. Yet, a strong citizenship movement would be needed for that to happen… which hardly will, if new subjectivities demanding it are not promoted. Politicians only challenge existing established interests, if ever, when taking the opportunity of getting more votes. Way more.

Secondly, (and this is connected with the first problem), in this model the capture of value generated in the network is still centralized. We want that those that add value and risk something in the platform are affected by the eventual downsides or upsides. The fact that a Coop Platform does it in a more ethical way, and that it redistributes the value afterwards does not change the fact that it keeps disempowering non-owners of the cooperative. Non-owners may consider that they are, to more or less degree, in the flow of value distribution, but not in its generation nor in its governance. The straightforward approach is to use new technologies based on blockchain (or other even more interesting technologies) in order to make distribution fair, keeping the self-interest motivated actors in the game. But if we design a Platform in which every aspect of the relationship must be translated into an algorithm and coded as a smart contract, then again we are consolidating and making fresh room for the already existing subjectivities. Even more, that will erode the real face-to-face trust thick relationships that may exist. A completely different thing is to use blockchain technologies for doing boring accounting that has to be done in a p2p organization based on thick relationships, or between p2p organizations linked by thick relationships. As in the centralized case, a decentralized architecture based on thin relationships could be, in the best of the cases, a transitory step to something much more interesting, once the limitations of the model are reached and new opportunities are explored.

The third problem is that the Platform Coops, in order to compete in the market with regular platforms, may need to transfer risk or care to some of their stakeholders. The reason why most of the regular platforms thrive is because they avoid granting the usual benefits (care) that workers get in the traditional economy (pension, social security, paid vacations, etc.), and additionally, force workers to carry most of the risks (accidents, illness, etc.). Unless clients are aware and concerned about workers’ conditions — which is an emerging but not yet a game-changing trend — the market will make more competitive those platforms that cut costs that way, not to mention that most of them are fueled with big investor’s money in order to keep litigating with authorities and workers, and operating under financial losses for years. In order to survive and keep their share of the market, Coop Platforms may be tempted to practice the less aggressive practices of risk and care transfer to workers as a way of surviving.

In the second part of this post, I will explore operational responses to these problems.

The post Platform Coops’ Governance (I): Challenges appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

The post Disrupting the disruptors: The collaborative economy changes direction appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this interview we caught up with Felix Weth, founder of Fairmondo. Fairmondo, a co-operative social business, is a fair mass marketplace that aims to fight corruption and give power back to the consumer and crowd. 

Felix Weth talks about Fairmondo, whom we recently profiled in our Commons Transition Primer. This interview was originally published by TBD.

What was your motivation for founding Fairmondo?

There were two main motivations for founding Fairmondo, both probably not what you might expect. First, I had been thinking for long time about how we can really address the problem of corruption. After giving it much thought, I realized we will have to change the way our economy works. So why not try by creating an enterprise that works differently, and at the same time, raises funds for anti-corruption activists.

Secondly, I was travelling through African countries in 2011 and realised that everywhere the Internet was spreading quickly, yet the notorious online monopolies from the US, Europe, and Asia had not yet fully grabbed these markets. To me it appeared that there is still a chance to keep these markets locally owned. So I thought, why not try to start a global network of user-owned companies that will face the financial power of the large online multinationals through the power of the crowd. Here we have a true common interest of the “normal people” from “North and South”.

Fairmondo used to be Fairnoply, why the switch? What’s different now?

We had legal issues with the name Fairnopoly. But also, it did not really fit to the next step we wanted to take: Making our marketplace more mainstream and developing it into a mass-marketplace – just with a fair, crowd-owned business behind it. There is still a long way to go, but with Fairmondo we widened the target group from the proactive “changers” towards conscious online-shoppers.

Over 1,900 people are currently part of the Fairmondo co-op – can you explain how it works and what the benefit of this model is? Is there any downside?

In short, our coop allows any user to become an owner and make sure that we live up to our principles. One important aspect is that no one can buy larger shares – Fairmondo is not designed to make anybody rich, but to benefit society. We also have defined a maximum salary range. The highest salary can be at max three times the lowest. These measures are designed to ensure that even if Fairmondo grows big and starts generating massive revenues, it will never be interesting for people whose goal in life is making the most money possible.

One downside is that we have a special challenge in raising sufficient scaling capital (which would normally be several million Euros for a project like ours). It is not impossible, it just requires convincing a lot of people. In some moments, we have done quite well in convincing the crowd that we need to push together to create something big. At other points it got much more difficult, in particular when things took much longer than we had expected.

This poses quite a significant challenge, you need sufficient funds to create a product that fascinates the crowd and you need a reasonably convinced crowd to raise these funds. However I think we are on the right track, thanks to the enormous support of many people and in particular, the enormous efforts invested by our team and external volunteers.

How do you measure your social impact?

By the size of the market share that we have taken over from Amazon & co. Thus so far not a whole lot…

But we have achieved other positive impact, for example by spreading our model. There are four more coops 2.0 now, and we continue consulting other young startups who pick up the coop-model, despite its still dusty reputation in Germany. (While being the most progressive legal structures our society has yet developed).

And in 2014 we did our first balance of common goods “Gemeinwohlbilanz”, a tool to measure the social impact of any business though a variety of indicators.

How are you financed and how do you plan to finance yourselves long-term?

We are financed through the shares of our 1900+ members plus some private loans by our members. More than half of the shares we raised through crowdinvesting campaigns.

Of course, on the long-term Fairmondo needs to sustain itself fully through its business. To achieve that more quickly, we have just launched a new product, a system of monthly subscriptions to baskets of fair and sustainable goods. Behind the baskets are a strategy that involve local shops and transport by cargo-bikes, if you’re interested in learning more, you can check it out here.

You’ve earned substantial sums through your crowdfunding campaigns, how do you motivate people to support you?

We asked our members, and by far the most important motivation for them is our vision: To create a fair, democratic large-scale enterprise that becomes a true alternative to the currently dominating online-marketplaces.

I think it also helps that we try to be as transparent as possible, including talking about our mistakes.

Every endeavor has its ups and downs, was there ever a low point and if so, how did you overcome it?

Oh yes, we had ups and downs and many more will come! A low point was at the end of 2013, when we had just launched our second big crowd funding campaign to finance the next year. The problem was not so much that we had run out of money or that our trademark was challenged. It was rather a collective low in the motivation and energy of the team. Which then had negative effects on all other issues, in particular our campaign. We had worked unpaid before and we had taken absurd challenges before, but you need some inner strength for doing that.

The whole of last year we worked on an extremely tight budget and finally had to radically cut paying ourselves again. Some people left, but with the remaining team we have a much better spirit than in the last crisis. This makes me optimistic that we will eventually succeed.

What are three learnings you would share with other social entrepreneurs?

First: Don’t overwork yourself. If you get into that situation, it comes at the expense of the strategic overview. And that weakens every aspect of your project.

Second: Have the courage to delegate and let people help you. But never forget that you are still responsible for the things you delegated and for making sure they work in the end.

Third: Carefully reflect on the expectations you create. Not what you actually say, but what others understand. Managing expectations once they are there (even if you never promised them) is much harder than (unintentionally) creating them.

The post The New Cooperatives: the case of Fairmondo appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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.

Platform cooperatives combine a technology platform with cooperative ownership. First described by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, this approach appeals both to traditional coops looking to go digital, and startups trying to build a fairer world. For some, it’s a natural response to the co-option of the sharing economy by capitalism.

Open 2017 is the first major UK conference to bring together this broad church of utopians, libertarians, open source advocates, trade unionists, and anarchists. Never have I heard the same words used on the same stage with such contradictory intent! “Solidarity” for me conjures up images of striking workers in the 1970s, but here it’s often used to imply community cohesion. How many other concepts are lost in translation? Do we need a new vocabulary to describe a new movement?

Open source and coops

A crazy dream…
Listening to @epilepticrabbit and @jdaviescoates on the parallels between #open and #coops … #opencoop @WeAreOpenCoop pic.twitter.com/acT1ty1Hil

— Bryan Mathers (@BryanMMathers) February 16, 2017

There’s a broad crossover between the values of the open source community and the values of the cooperative movement. Open source focuses on the process of producing and sharing code, whereas cooperatives care more about ownership and power structures. Both value transparency, both abhor hierarchy. The success of open source over the last 20 years gives hope to the cooperative movement: hope that one day, cooperative models of governance could be as widely used as open source code.

Single constituency or multi-constituency?

Cooperatives are a legal solution to a fundamental social problem: how best to distribute surplus? When we think of coops, in the UK we tend to think of consumer cooperatives, where you need to be a member to buy a product or service. These businesses usually aim to keep prices low for the customer. The other main category is producer cooperatives. Rory Ridley-Duffdescribed three types of employee owned business: trust owned (like John Lewis), direct owned, and worker cooperatives (like Suma). These often focus more on fair pay and employment security. Both of these structures prioritize one “constituency” — buyers of products, or sellers of labour.

Much rarer are the “multi-constituency” cooperatives, as described by Cliff Mills. These incorporate multiple stakeholders within their membership: consumers, producers, workers, suppliers, and the local community. While these are better suited to pursuing a common good, the risk is that by internalising tensions, they may end up stuck in a stalemate when forced to decide on issues where their members disagree. Platform cooperativism could provide an opportunity to codify group decision making practices that make multi-stakeholder coops more viable.

Scaling decision making

https://twitter.com/startuple/status/832267617784233986

There are as many decision making methods as there are organizations. Bob Cannell laid out a spectrum of options, from unanimity to anarchy: consensus, consensual, vetoes, majority voting (direct or representative), subsidiarity, and the “sorry not please” principle.

Tools like Loomio and Backfeed seek to scale group decision making, by making it easy for people to propose, vote, evaluate and reward. Common feedback from coop members was that culture was more important than the constitution or the technology. Practices like appreciative enquiry — concentrating on the positive when giving feedback — ensure that people feel their contributions are valued. This has parallels within open source and volunteer run organisations, where thanking people for their work is an important part of each interaction.

Federation: coops of coops

https://twitter.com/smcdoyle/status/832174783852924928

Are coops going to take over the world? Not unless it gets easier to start them, run them, and fund them. In terms of legal admin, it’s still harder to create your startup as a coop than to incorporate as a limited company. Running a successful coop requires different skills from top down management, and nascent coops need support in learning these culture lessons. Traditional VCs usually steer clear of coops, because they are not satisfied with “reasonable returns” — too busy unicorn hunting! Equity crowdfunding and FairShares need wider adoption to solve the funding problem, or growing coops could end up more constrained than enabled by their cooperative status.

Enspiral, Stocksy and Fairmondo are inspiring advocates of platform cooperativism, but more needs to be done to demystify their operational secret sauce. Cooperative federations seek to educate and nurture members. The Platform Cooperativism Consortium supports all platform coops, CoTechassists cooperatives in the technology sector, and AltGen encourages young people to start coops.

Open 2017 was a great place to meet people who are practising what they preach  Videos from the event are available on the website. Looking forward to next year!

Startuple is François Hoehl and Sinead Doyle. Find out more at startuple.works

Photo by Anders Adermark

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The first problem I encounter is pervasive in all the writing out there on the sharing/collaborative economy and p2p theory: the lack of a clear and operational definition of what a peer is and what a community is. The truth is that we may need a “taxonomy” of peers and communities, since we call peers and communities in a wide range of different realities.

How do we recognize someone as a peer? I can be tempted, as we do often colloquially,  to define my peer in terms of characteristics of the person (i.e. same hierarchical position, same knowledge, same skills, same values, etc.). But homogeneity is not what we find in peer relationships out there. Actually, we find more value in diversity. A peer is better understood not as someone that is like you, but as someone that you like. And if we think about organizations, as someone you would like to do things with.

This points out important consequences: a peer can only be defined as long as it has a peer; and what makes possible to call them peers is the existence of a certain kind of relationship. In this relationship, both feel comfortable with the idea of being peers, and this reciprocity can only be maintained as long as they both agree on which terms the idea of being peers is established. Therefore, the key aspect of the relationship is reciprocity in the agency of the parts.

The word agency comes from Latin agere that means “to do, to act in such way that has an effect”.  Amy and John will be peers as long as they can define together what constitute their “peerness”, and this is the primary agency that regulates the rest of agencies once they recognize each other as peers. What makes them peers is that they are able to define what kind of reciprocity makes them peers, and consequently, what effect it has in what they can or cannot do because of this relationship. All human groups exist because they accept a list of dos and don’ts. But groups of peers can co-create them. Since doing is what constitute the very essence of a peer-to-peer relationship, that relationship will be freely established in terms that both parts will be capable to do more or different things thanks to it. A p2p organization empowers both parts through reciprocity. This way, the eventual common characteristics of the peers that form a p2p organization are not the reason that made them peers, but the consequence of being peers. But “peer” and “community” are buzz-words nowadays. For instance, there are plenty of communities in which participants are called peers but they are not. People join them and accept the “peer” label just because they get some value from being there, and no cost for being called “peers”.

This leads us to the core of the problem. In order to give stability to relationships, people need trust; a reasonable confidence in what we can expect from others to behave.  We know from the sociological tradition that there are two kind of ties to build trust. The first kind are ties established through mechanisms of socialization and emotional engagement, while the second are ties established through the assumption that others will act according to rational and self-interest calculations. The first characterizes traditional communities, the second is the one that has shaped our modern societies. The first shapes communities that are protecting and comforting but also stiffly and rigid; the second shapes communities that are liberating and innovative but also alienating. Communities and societies present, at the end, a combination of the two types of ties, but our current economic system is based mainly in the second type, and they are dramatically corroding the first type. Some authors hypothesize that the tension between the two is provoking the emergence of collaboration. Others, just the simple collapse of our current societies, and we should not take collaboration for granted unless we work on it.

Peerness’ reciprocity is the obvious way to prevent relationships from being stiffing or alienating. This way, you may find egalitarian intentional communities with thick ties (which members share a roof and livelihood) or the community of torrent users with thin ties (which members hardly know each other), that they do not feel trapped or alienated by their communities.

So, then, what is a community? Traditionally, community is understood as a group of people that share something in common, but also, as the very conditions for sharing that in common in the first place. If peers share an agreement of what they want to do together, (and at the end, members of communities come and go!), then we better understand community as the set of institutions that builds the confidence/trust for doing things together.

We are ready to see a taxonomy of paradigmatic communities in the economic world:

Taxonomy of Communities

We see four kind of different communities for which we do not have a name, but their paradigmatic examples are clear: a family business, a corporation, a kibbutz, and a consumers’ cooperative. They are “not peers with thick ties”, “not peers with thin ties”, “peers with thick ties”, and “peers with thin ties”. You may think, “and what about my peer colleagues in my department”? Well, you tell me. How are your relationships? Like members of a family? Like members of a corporation? Like members of a kibbutz? Or like members of a consumer coop?

Until now, each kind of community faced different limitations. For the sake of simplicity (I will refine this in my next post), let’s say that those communities based on “thick ties” had a limit of scale, being the Dunbar number their limit to growth without loosing their thick ties. Although they have the strong commitment of its members, they never had the critical mass to face big investments for major operations in order to compete with bigger organizations. On the other hand, communities based on “thin ties” have flourished and gained an outstanding influence, at the cost of the alienation of its members. Despite all their efforts for developing strong cultures (sic) and aligned missions and visions, and so on, Gallup found that “71% of American workers are “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” in their work, meaning they are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and are less likely to be productive”.

Traditional Limits

But technological development has changed and is still dramatically changing the economy through:

– A reduction of the optimal scales of production

– A reduction of transaction costs

What it is interesting is that the reduction of the optimal scales of production and transaction costs are affecting the four kind of communities very differently. The traditional “commitment-scale” trade off is vanishing, and this is the true cornerstone of what we call the collaborative economy:

New opportunities

So yes, we can look back to the book’s insights and agree with:

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins, being the wineskins the new business models for rent-seeking.

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users, so they can capture all the value.

But then others deserve to be analyzed further:

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

Well, yes and no. They disguise as much as they can thin ties’ trust with the appearance of thick ties’ trust. But they deliver a trust environment; otherwise they would not exist.

And others become problematic, because they clearly do not apply to all Coop-Platforms…

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

 …because they depend on the particular architecture of each coop-platform:

 6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

And at the end, most of the Coop- Platforms discussed in the book are not designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. This way, value will still be captured in a centralized way despite:

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

For instance, it is true that Coop-Platforms as Fairmondo, (which by the way, is a company that I LOVE), have set mechanisms for returning value to society, which leaves its community out of the equation:

The usual justification is that some Coop-Platforms articulate community and society through special boards, because:

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

And… we really must stop here. What is the role of the community in an multi-stakeholder interdependence scheme? I am afraid we cannot discuss multi-stakeholder interdependence if we do not look first at the “governance” of each kind of community that we described before. Otherwise, how could we rightly understand interdependence with other stakeholders?

This will be the object of discussion of my next post.

Photo by antonychammond

The post On Platform Coops: what the heck is a peer? And a community? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

(16 mins) Felix Weth — Fairmondo is an online marketplace owned by its users. It is open to professional as well as private sellers, with no general restrictions on what products and services can be offered, except for illegal offers or offers deemed unacceptable by our members. By contrast, through the positive promotion of products that fulfill a set of criteria for “fairness,” Fairmondo makes it easy for users to shop in line with their values. These criteria are constantly open for discussion and improvement by members and the broader user base. Founded in Germany in 2012, Fairmondo is a multi-stakeholder cooperative with open membership for every person who feels affected by its activities. Its statutes include a legally binding commitment to uncompromising transparency and democratic accountability. The managing board is elected by the employees, to ensure a culture of mutual respect within the operating team.

The post Felix Weth on Fairmondo and Open Multi-Stakeholder Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Christopher D. Cook: In 2008, Alanna Krause hit a wall. Just 25 years old and already rising through the corporate ranks as a global technical support team leader at Bloomberg in London, Krause began to feel that her work was “meaningless.”

“No matter how well I did my job or how much I improved things, ultimately what I was doing was moving numbers from one column to another column,” Krause said.

A year later, amid a rousing protest against the G-20 Summit near her office, Krause had a deeper epiphany. “I was climbing this ladder, but I looked ahead of myself and I saw that no matter how far up it I climbed, there was nowhere up there I wanted to go,” Krause recalled in a speech at the New Frontiers 2016 conference in New Zealand.

Embarking on a journey many might dream of, Krause quit her job and traveled through Spain, India, and the U.S., looking for meaning and fulfillment. She eventually landed in Wellington, New Zealand, where she joined the decentralized, entrepreneurial collective Enspiral.

Functioning as a supportive umbrella for freelancers and social enterprises, Enspiral offers its members creative independence and a strong sense of community. Members pool and invest a portion of the profits from their work into new social-impact projects.

Alanna Krause shows how collective funds can be used at Enspiral.

Enspiral is “a bubble within which we can make our own economy, where we get to set the rules,” Krause says. “We don’t have to wait for the world out there to change for us to start living in the transition economy, right now.”

While Enspiral may operate in a bit of a bubble because its core members are highly paid independent software programmers, it is part of a growing movement forging new paths for freelancers in an increasingly unstable work world.

An emerging collectivist movement

Like an extended smashing of atoms, the 9-to-5 job market has shattered and splintered over the past 25 years in ways that have both liberated and trapped millions of workers.

Uber drivers, ditch-digging day laborers, adjunct professors, freelance software designers, temp attorneys, domestic workers, and often woefully underpaid “task rabbits” hired online at a moment’s notice, wouldn’t appear to have much in common. Their pay and working conditions vary wildly, and some push paper while others handle steering wheels, mops, diapers, or sledge hammers — but what unites them is a gig economy marked by flexibility, instability, innovation, and legal and financial uncertainty.

As the gig economy proliferates, growing numbers are breaking away and creating their own work communities, based on a mix of autonomy and interdependence. Combating precarious economics and social isolation, freelancers are using new open-source technology and old-fashioned shoe leather organizing to create new ways to work and to work together.

Enspiral, for instance, uses a mix of physical meeting spaces, open-source technology, and digital organizing to help workers build creative and economic independence as well as community. The collective is just one piece of a burgeoning global freelancers’ movement that is helping independent workers to reposition power and ownership in a platform-driven age.

Scanning the freelancing terrain, Steve King, a partner at Emergent Research, says he finds loose-knit “guild-like groups informally banding together to help each other” who are sharing their networks and resources for mutual gain. From coworking spaces to platform-based support groups, these freelancers’ networks have cropped up organically, King says.

The constellation of freelancer organizing ranges from Enspiral-type freelancer collectives to newfangled unions for gig workers such as Uber drivers. Whether fighting for living wages and basic rights, or collaborating on projects with fellow freelancers, these initiatives share the larger aim of creating meaning, dignity, and power in their work together.

The gig economy’s roots

As more goods and services are sold via the web and mobile apps on an as-needed (or wanted) basis, the freelance and gig workforce has exploded. In the U.S. alone, 55 million people — about 35 percent of the total labor force — worked on a freelance basis in 2016, according to a newly released study by the New York City-based Freelancers Union and digital freelancing platform Upwork. The ranks of freelancers jumped by 700,000 in just one year, from 2014-2015. Roughly two-thirds of freelancers, 63 percent, are working independently by choice rather than sheer necessity, the study found.

Just in time for the elections, the study also concluded that 67 percent of freelancers “are more likely to vote for candidates who say they support them having ‘a strong voice in deciding issues about their work’ or ‘having access to health and retirement benefits regardless of their employment status.’”

Now that everything else is scalable, modular, liquid and temporary, shouldn’t your benefits be portable? Photo: Freelancers Union, Flickr.

“Independent professionals are an increasingly integral part of the U.S. workforce,” Upwork CEO Stephane Kasriel says. “We should be addressing their interests or America will fall behind countries that are better equipping their evolving workforces.”

Sara Horwitz, founder and executive director of the Freelancers Union, echoes that sentiment.

Freelancers “are a diverse but vital part of the U.S. economy, contributing over $1 trillion in freelance earnings to the economy,” Horowitz says. “Now’s the time for business leaders, policy makers and candidates alike to stand up and take notice of their potential influence and to start developing ways to help them overcome the most pressing issues impacting their lives.”

Beyond the coffee shop: freelancers go from “working alone together” to working collectively. Photo by Tim Gouw, Unsplash.

The complex and evolving landscape of freelancing includes compelling success stories but also deep disparities, just as in the larger labor market. “Because contingent work can be unstable or afford fewer worker protections, it tends to lead to lower earnings, fewer benefits, and a greater reliance on public assistance than standard work,” a 2015 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office stated.

Despite vast ranges in worker empowerment and income, this is a precarious group, the GAO found. Contingent workers are more likely than full-time employees to be people of color, women, low-income, and with less education and class mobility.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the ranks of Britain’s self-employed workers have risen by 732,000 since 2008, while permanent conventional jobs rose by 339,000, according to an in-depth report published by Co-operatives UK and partners titled “Not Alone.” But while this may seem a sign of spirited entrepreneurialism, the report found that low-income workers in the self-employed sector are now the norm.

This upheaval has its roots in a deeper power struggle over the terms and conditions of labor. “There is a long-term shift of power from workers to employers since the 1970s,” says Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston University.

Schor says plunging rates of unionization, increased corporate power, anti-labor policies since the Reagan era in the U.S., and a move to producing goods on an as-needed basis globally, have led to a “weakening of workers” — a key reason behind today’s precarious labor. This steady diminishing of workers’ rights has placed even more power in the hands of corporations.

Amid a more volatile global market, “companies don’t want to be locked into providing income security for their workers,” says Gerald Friedman, professor of economics at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

This volatility is one of the driving factors behind the freelancers’ collectives cropping up today. But it’s not a new phenomenon. “In the nineteenth century, working class self-help organisations included craftsmen’s guilds, co-operatives, friendly societies and the first unions,” the authors of the “Not Alone” report noted.

In today’s “age of economic insecurity and rapid changes in technology there is now the opportunity to reinvent democratic self-help for the twenty-first century in order to widen participation on a fair basis for all in work,” the report added.

Freelancers get collective

Today’s freelancer collectives are driven not just by fancy technology and well-remunerated innovation — they’re sometimes driven by a passion for social change at community and societal levels.

In Spain’s Catalonia region, the Cooperativa Integral Catalana (CIC) offers everything from common meeting places and community dialogues on economic alternatives, to income tax benefits and community pantries where people share local food.

The cooperative strives to be an autonomous community and is building its own kind of political-cultural-economic commons. Once every two weeks, the cooperative hosts open assemblies to discuss ongoing and new projects, ranging from reports and documentaries on capitalism, to developing independent currencies to conduct trade outside of the larger economic system.

The CIC has set its sights on a wider transformation of society — a vision that spans personal autonomy, community sovereignty, and creative exploration of new ways of living and working.

Cooperativa Integral Catalana members with a co-op produced energy drink, which can also be purchased using social currency. Photo by Luis Camargo, CiC, Flickr.

“It is one of our tasks, empowering us to explore other forms of reciprocity, use of so­­­­­­­­cial currencies, fair coins, direct barter and exchange, un-monetized economies, and gift economies,” CIC member Raquel Benedicto says.

Other collectives may not be as explicitly political, yet are forging new collaborative communities that are slowly but surely democratizing the economics of creativity.

In Berlin, the Agora Collective provides artists and other creative workers with a shared space and collaborative formats for developing their work. Agora, which was founded as a coworking space in 2011, provides studios for artists and dancers, collaborative artist workshop programs, residencies, and programs that support international artist collaborations.

“Our coworking floors accommodate professionals of all fields, and allow a diverse and active community to flourish in our building,” the group describes on its website.

With strategic partnerships across Europe, and financial assistance from the Nordic Culture Fund and the Swiss Foundation among others, Agora has been able to think big — providing not only coworking spaces and collaborations, but ongoing dialogues and projects that invite new ways of thinking about work and how it should be valued. Agora’s Circular Economy project, for instance, is an extended conversation about ways to re-organize production and consumption to eliminate waste.

Similarly, Netherlands-based Seats2Meet (S2M) blends shared workspaces and social networking, tapping an immense desire among freelancers to expand opportunities and social connections. Since its launch with just 10 people in 2005, S2M has grown steadily, connecting tens of thousands of independent workers to thousands of free, shared workspaces around the world — and to each other. As Shareable reported in 2013, S2M links freelancers up with diverse kinds of physical spaces, including ice cream shops, libraries, theatres, and even hospitals.

S2M president Ronald van den Hoff says what began as an experiment in sharing physical spaces evolved into a knowledge exchange, peer support network, and community for oft-isolated indie workers. “The rise of the numbers of people using the ‘free workplaces and catering’ was staggering,” Van den Hoff says. “Within months we had hundreds of independent workers daily visiting us, filling up the public lounge, and logistically we were completely overwhelmed.”

Seats2Meet headquarters in Utrecht, Netherlands. Photo: Neal Gorenflo.

Freelancers, “started to co-work almost automatically and share their knowledge and network, [and] somehow the reciprocity flourished,” he says. “So we decided to use ‘the willingness to share’ as a form of payment.” In other words, people could co-work for free as long as they agreed to help each other.

Although S2M is a for-profit company, Van den Hoff says its detachment from venture capital and other forms of investment return imperatives has empowered this model of sharing work among freelancers.

“The main limit is people themselves: the moment startups are financed by VC’s, they are protecting their assets — ‘it is my database, my network, my clients’ — and they lose their ability to share,” he says.

S2M is redefining work and workers’ relationship to each other in important ways. Providing free workspace to those who help each other, for instance, represents the seed of a new social contract between workers, rather than between workers and companies. The organization’s community is rooted in peer support.

New Zealand’s Enspiral Network has also created an inspired model of freelancer collaboration and community. What began as a coworking space among like-minded people in Wellington six years ago has evolved into a new-fangled cooperative linking freelancers and social enterprises in a global network of mutual aid and collective action.

Like other freelancer collectives, Enspiral, has grown beyond simply sharing a physical space. The organization mixes independence and collectivism, enabling creative workers such as graphic designers, tech gurus, data whizzes, and others to pursue their ventures — with administrative and other support systems funded collectively by the group’s members.

“What do you need?” — taking care of each other at Enspiral. Photo: Namaste.org.

The Enspiral Foundation, a charity run by Enspiral members, provides the connective tissue between the community’s contributing members, freelancers, and social enterprises alike. Contributors voluntarily donate to the foundation, and decide democratically how to use the money to improve their social impact and business prospects. Together, contributors’ have created Enspiral Services, a “market-facing” entity where they promote their services collectively.

Among the group’s many innovations is Loomio Cooperative, whose main offering is an open source democratic decision-making platform. Launched in 2012 when Enspiral members and Occupy activists recognized a need for collaborative decision-making tools, Loomio is simultaneously a limited liability company with investors and a registered worker-owned cooperative.

All these organizations represent new models of independent and interdependent worker communities supporting each other’s work socially, professionally, and collaboratively — created from scratch, without huge amounts of capital, big investors, or bureaucracy.

The cooperative explosion

Growing numbers of freelancers are also seeking out or creating cooperatives — some organized as online platforms, others old-fashioned brick-and-mortar — for community and financial stability.

Despite many distinctions, what unites platform co-ops and traditional worker co-ops is their focus on shared worker power and profits. “In the 19th and 20th century, the shop floor was the primary arena for worker organizing, now it’s platforms,” says Nathan Schneider, writer and scholar-in-residence at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Amid the demise of the labor social contract and the rise of contingent work, says Schneider, the gig economy creates “atomized and individualized participants, and is really structured for us to be competing with each other.”

“We need to imagine alternatives to that model,” Schneider says.

As the gig economy has centralized profits while decentralizing work, digital activists and entrepreneurial creators are launching slews of platform cooperatives — websites and mobile apps that provide a service or sell a product but that share ownership, governance, and profits with users. Tech-savvy sharers have created cooperative online marketplaces and peer-to-peer venues like Stocksy and Fairmondo, where the creators and producers run the show.

Fairmondo, founded in Germany in 2012, is a platform co-op alternative to eBay where the more than 2,000 online sellers are member-owners. It puts openness, fairness, and democracy at the core of the enterprise. Co-op employees choose at least half of Fairmondo’s executive board, and major business decisions are made democratically through a general assembly of members. To support their global expansion, Fairmondo is developing a network of self-directed local cooperatives, including one in the UK soon.

“We have seen phenomenal growth of worker co-ops in the past ten years, partly because workers are more precarious, more vulnerable,” says Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. “We see people starting worker co-ops to gain protections, because they are too vulnerable on their own. When you’re an independent worker, it’s harder to bargain than when you are part of a cooperative.”

Particularly inspiring, says Hoover, is the “exploding trend” of service sector worker co-ops, many of them launched by immigrant women.

Caregivers, domestic workers, and taxi drivers are joining forces in worker-led and often union-supported ventures to reclaim power and voice in their work. Teaming up with unions and worker advocacy groups such as Make the Road New York, workers are starting co-op businesses providing services such as domestic care and ride hailing services.

“There’s so much focus on Uber drivers, but nobody cares about the day laborers, nobody cares about the domestic workers,” says Emergent Research’s King. “We have to remember this economic shift is hitting people hard, and we have to focus on the ones getting hit the hardest.”

In New York City, transgender Latina beauticians, long suffering discrimination and abuse, are forming their own worker-owned business. “The girls got immediately excited by the idea of creating a business where they would be the sole owners, where there wouldn’t be any bosses verbally and physically harassing them, and where they could earn a dignified wage to survive,” Daniel Puerto, worker cooperative developer at Make the Road New York, a nonprofit that fights for the rights of minorities, told ink.nyc.

Taxi driver co-ops are also paving the way to increased wages, diminished pay gaps between managers and employees, and cab driver healthcare — all while producing a profit, according to a 2015 Democracy at Work report.

Denver alone is home to two driver-run taxi co-ops, showing there is plenty of interest and promise in this alternative. The biggest, Green Taxi Cooperative, employs more than 700 drivers, unionized within the Communication Workers of America, which represents numerous cab worker co-ops. Union Taxi, another taxi driver co-op supported by CWA, slashed drivers’ car lease rate by two-thirds, increasing their earning power and free time.

This May, the New York-based Independent Drivers Guild (IDG) secured an agreement to improve pay, benefits, and working conditions for more than 35,000 Uber drivers, who are treated as independent contractors and thus denied workers’ compensation and other protections. The IDG, affiliated with the Machinists Union, gives these app-based drivers the collective power to improve their earnings and fight abuses on the job.

Through the guild, “our voice will be heard,” says longtime New York City driver and organizer Muhammed Barlas. “More money comes into their pocket, plus they have some protection,” he says.

The two-tiered platform economy

Of course, not everyone is finding entrepreneurial success. The gig economy notion of workers opting in droves to become well-paid freelancers masks a more complicated reality. For every finely paid independent consultant, there are many more “freelance” domestic workers, janitors, and others contending with lower wages and precarious work.

Surveys simultaneously show that a majority of freelance workers want to remain independent, and that an increasing percentage of the labor market — particularly Millennials and minorities — have difficulty attaining adequate paying full-time employment.

Depending on factors ranging from pay and economic leverage to issues of entrepreneurialism and risk, what represents precarious work for some also marks independence for others. Many experience both.

The issue of worker choice is central to whether freelancers and other independent toilers are satisfied with their situation, says Emergent Research’s King. “Consistently fifty to sixty percent of those doing independent work tell us they chose it and they like it,” he says. “About thirty percent say they hate it and want to go back. A lot of it is psychology, people’s risk profiles.”

Our “choices” as workers operate in a context and continuum of real and perceived options — as well as our ability to command high enough wages that we can exercise that free choice.

What dictates worker choice, freedom, and power is not always so clear-cut. “Whether you’re a freelancer by choice or by necessity, what we’re seeing is that the line is increasingly blurry,” says Melissa Hoover, executive director of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

For instance, Hoover says, some lower-paid independent workers are highly entrepreneurial, while, adjunct professions may not want to be working on a freelance basis.

“There’s a substantive difference between freelancers organizing to get more work, and independent workers protecting themselves against abuse on the job,” she says.

At the same time, Hoover says, high wage freelancers also need basic legal protections. “The common thread is that without an employer there’s very little protection, very little stability,” she says. “Whether you’re freelancing by choice or not, you’re still dealing with the externalization of costs by employers.”

Despite the risks and uncertainty, researchers for the “Not Alone” report concluded that many self-employed workers “enjoy working this way and would not necessarily want to return to a traditional job.”

“While this does not disguise their low income and their social and economic insecurity, a key point to take into account is that they do not necessarily want ‘saving’ or ‘rescuing’ from self-employment but instead seek recognition, support, and assurance that the risks and rewards of their status are balanced fairly between them and the organisations they trade with,” the report noted.

The role of unions

Unions may seem an afterthought in today’s disarrayed economy, where only eight percent of the private sector workforce enjoys collective bargaining power. Yet, while still organizing millions of workers directly on job sites, unions play an equally important role as supporting actor for worker alliances, cooperatives, and guilds seeking to galvanize freelancers’ power.

“Labor was built firm by firm, sector by sector — now the economy is far more fluid,” says Institute for the Future’s Natalie Foster. Since the early 1990s when the “temping of America” and contingent work disrupted traditional shop-floor organizing based on a single worksite, unions have scrambled to adapt to this atomized workforce.

Technology may be part problem and part solution. The tech-based jobs in the gig economy have further dispersed workers and jobs, making it harder for unions to connect and organize — but many unions are embracing both shoe leather and digital organizing.

With support from The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) and more than 50 community-based domestic worker groups around the country, the Domestic Workers Alliance has emerged as a change agent for thousands of nannies, housekeepers, and caregivers across the U.S. who are pressured into independent contractor status marked by unlivable wages and abuse on the job.

As more of this “work that makes all other work possible” gets farmed out via online platforms such as care.com and handy.com, these workers — largely immigrant women and women of color — become further isolated.

“The more companies go online to find domestic workers, they’re getting all their workers on their platform, it’s really affecting how workers find work,” says Barbara Young, national organizing director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA), and a 17-year veteran of domestic work herself.

Many domestic workers endure 60-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, harassment and abuse, no time off for personal health, and lack of clarity about their pay and job security, says Young. Nearly one in four are paid below their state’s minimum wage.

An NDWA survey found that domestic work is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, Young says. “But the reality of the work is it’s very unstable and insecure.”

Young says platforms like care.com initially offered $5 an hour domestic jobs, but “we said it’s too low, you’re breaking the law,” and eventually, with pressure from her organization and its 20,000 domestic workers, some firms improved.

Another domestic worker alliance initiative, Fair Care Labs, helps spawn market-based and technology-driven ventures to create a just future for the industry.

“As more domestic work shifts online, through on-demand platforms in the gig economy and online marketplaces, the issues related to domestic work have been shifted, not solved,” Palak Shah, the group’s alliance director of social innovations, explains on the group’s website. “We want to effect change while the DNA of the online economy is still being written.”

As this “DNA” writes itself, the AFL-CIO and many worker advocacy groups are promoting public policies to help protect the millions of on-demand workers who may not benefit from platform innovations.

In its agenda for the on-demand economy, the labor umbrella group promotes racial and gender equity in new digital economy jobs, advocates for new approaches to hold companies accountable for their working conditions, and champions portable benefits policies that will provide workers with a robust safety net.

Beyond equitable wages and protections, however, lie equally important if less tangible challenges: How can we ensure that these emerging freelancers’ collectives are able to sustain their work in the long-term? What role could public policy play in supporting these efforts? Can these communities find ways to share their knowledge and lessons learned to aid future freelancer initiatives?

Amid a fractured employment world marked by invention and insecurity, freelancers are confronting macro-level economic challenges as well as age-old tensions between individualism and collectivism.

Even a successful story like Enspiral remains both inspiring and cautionary.

“Our freelancer co-op model is still underdeveloped,” cofounder Joshua Vial explains. “We face many unsolved challenges such as recruiting leadership, providing income security, managing quality, securing sufficient working capital, resourcing work ‘on’ the business and supporting people without managing them.”

As the economy promotes this dizzying mix of exploitation and inventive community-building, freelance workers — in both higher and lower wage sectors — are fighting for legal rights, creating new work arrangements, and building businesses with social vision. Somewhere between economic coercion and human agency, with plenty of success and struggle, freelancers are finding their way through the economic wilderness.

Our gratitude goes to Steve King and family who provided funding for this piece and other stories on freelancing, platform cooperatives, and libraries. 

Freelance collectives — stronger together. Photo: Mike Benedetti, Flickr.

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