Text: Lionel Maurel.  English translation: Pascasle Garbaye. See P2P Foundation wiki for original French version.

About

The purpose of this policy, proposed by Lionel Maurel, is to establish the governance principles in force within the association “La Coop des Communs” for the management of the rights to the productions of its members, in particular within the framework of the activities of its working groups.

The Coopyright proposal has the advantage of simply implementing a certain logic of reciprocity, but without having to write a new license, since everything is based on two already well-known Creative Commons licenses.

It’s about articulating:

• ”’Internal reciprocity”’: working groups remain free to choose whether and how their productions are made public.

Unless special circumstances warrant it and after approval of the board of directors of the association La Coop des Communs, they are by default placed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution – No Commercial Use – No modification),

For the active contributors to La Coop des Communs, the reuse of workgroup productions would be carried out according to the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence (Paternity – Identical sharing).

The Coop des Communs does not ask the authors for an assignment of rights.

The groups will therefore have to deliberate on their uses.

• ”’co-management, between the groups and the association, of the uses according to whether or not they are the result of non-profit or limited-profit organisations”’.

In the case of lucrative commercial use, a fee may be charged. A non-profit or limited lucrative use should be exempt from royalty.

The system is made operational by the ability to discriminate against the non-profit sector and limited lucrativity. An international application could be based on the current interpretation of these terms in each country concerned.

Introduction

For several years, a debate is in progress on the opportunity to create new licences, which would be neither “free” licences (such as GNU-GPL type) nor “open” licences (such as Creative Commons type). Many proposals, based on the concept of “strengthened reciprocal licence”, have been elaborated. The first proposal, coming from Dmitry Kleiner, was the Peer Production licence and the Belgian Michel Bauwens worked out the concept of “Copyfair”, which is for him fundamental for a transition to “Commons Economics”.

He summarizes these ideas as follows:

Copyleft licences allow anyone to re-use shared knowledge provided that modifications and improvements are added to these same commons. It’s a major step, but we cannot ignore the need for fairness. When moving to production of physical objects which requires finding resources for buildings, raw materials and payments for contributors, the unimpeded commercial exploitation of these commons favours extractive models.

Thus, it’s essential to maintain the idea of knowledge sharing, but also to request reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of these commons, to open up a sphere of activity for ethical economic entities that internalise social and environmental costs. This could be achieved through copyfair licences, which allow full sharing of the knowledge but ask for reciprocity in exchange for commercialisation right.

Bauwens think that Copyfair licences are one of the elements that will allow to bridge the gap between the Commons approach and the cooperative movement, by renewing the latter in the form of “Open Cooperativism”.

The problem is that proposals are on the table for several years now, but they are slow to produce concrete results. Since many prototypes have been designed, none of these new licences have been, so far, adopted on a significant scale and it is difficult even to quote concrete examples of projects that would implement such principles.

I must confess that this “deadlock” could led me to think that a “design error” had been made and I expressed serious doubts about reciprocal licences (doubts that, to tell the truth, have not yet completely left me…). However, the reason for this delay is also the great difficulty of defining legally the concept of “reciprocity” which can have several different meanings, not always compatible with each other.

Things were there until I crossed paths, last year, with the association La Coop des Communs, which goal is to “create alliances between the Commons and the Social and Solidarity Economy”. It brings together researchers, SSE actors and activists from the commons, promoting an interesting mixing between these different cultures.

But, La Coop des Communs itself has been quickly confronted with the choice of a licence for its own productions. It appeared that this could be an excellent ground for experimentation to try to implement legally the idea of “reciprocity for the Commons” by establishing a bridge with SSE. These reflections led to a proposal – in which I participated – called Coopyright (a pun on the idea of “cooperative copyright”).

A presentation is on La Coop des Communs website, but I will take a moment to explain the specificities of this proposal and what it is likely to generate.

A synthesis to overcome previous blockages

Coopyright draws heavily on previous proposals (Everything Is a Remix !), trying to overcome their respective weaknesses

The main source of inspiration remains Dmytri Kleiner’s Peer Production Licence, which was devised from the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA licence. His idea was to “specify” the NC option (Not for commercial use), stating that only entities with a cooperative form can use the resource.

More precisely, Peer Production Licence formulates its “reciprocity clause” as follows:

c. You may exercise your rights for commercial purposes only if :

i. You are a company or a cooperative owned by workers (worker owned)

ii. All financial gains, surpluses and profits generated by the company or cooperative are redistributed to workers.

d. Any use is prohibited by this licence for a company whose ownership and governance is private and whose purpose is to generate profit from the work of salaried employees.

We are therefore in an “organic” vision of reciprocity. The aim is to be able to distinguish between commercial entities of different nature, leaving a free use to “cooperatives” while keeping the possibility to submit to authorization and royalties classical “capitalist” companies. The problem is that this clause is drafted in a very restrictive way and, as it stands, only a small number of cooperatives can meet these criteria.

This is well explained by the lawyer Carine Bernault in an article about reciprocal licences :

The organic criterion adopted (“a company owned by its employees or a cooperative”) significantly reduces the possibilities of exploitation for commercial purposes. Moreover, the licence doesn’t define the notion of cooperative. However, if we look at the French cooperative production companies or SCOPs as an example, they are particularly characterised by an allocation of “operating surpluses” which must benefit, at least 25%, to all employees. Therefore, there is no guarantee that a SCOP fulfils the conditions, laid down in the licence, to engage in a commercial exploitation of the work.

For those reasons, the Peer Production Licence is, in my opinion, more a “proof of concept” than a real usable tool, because if the general idea of an “organic” criterion is interesting, the scope of application of the licence is too narrow. It doesn’t even apply to all cooperatives and forget the multitude of other institutional forms that SSE can take (associations, mutual funds, ESUS, etc.).

The second source of inspiration is Commons Reciprocity Licence.

In this proposal, the idea is to move away from an “organic” conception of reciprocity to promote reciprocity “in action”. In this vision, regardless of the status of the actors, the aim is to allow the free and unrestricted use of the Commons for those who contribute in return to the Commons. It would produce a more flexible and less discriminating result, since any company can have access to the resource, as long as it participates in the maintenance of Commons. But, this type of proposal also has weaknesses (and probably even more serious than those of the Peer Production Licence): how say exactly what is a Common? And what constitutes a “contribution to the Commons”? Should these contributions be quantified and evaluated and if so, how? In their proposal, Miguel Said Viera and Primavera de Filippi suggest using BlockChain for resolving these difficulties, but personally, I am suspicious of this convenient Deus Ex Machina that constitutes the BlockChain currently. In this view the link between reciprocity licensing and SSE is removed, even if it has the merit of introducing the interesting concept of “reciprocity in action”.

A third source of inspiration has been the FairShares project supported by the association of the same name, developing a vision of reciprocity that could be called “institutional”. In their proposal, there is no need to invent a new licence, as their system works as a “switch” between two Creative Commons licences. The resources produced are available under licence CC-BY-SA (therefore with possibility of commercial use) for the members of the association who participate in its activity. For “outside” persons and entities, resources are licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND and commercial use is subject to royalties. The interesting point, here, is first of all the economy of means and the possibility to link up to Creative Commons, which are the best-known licences in the World. There is also a dimension of “internal reciprocity” implemented within the same productive community. But once again we lose the link with ESS, which was the strength of the Peer Production Licence.

There are interesting aspects in all of these proposals, but none seemed really satisfactory. Thus, to elaborate the Coopyright, the idea has been to integrate the different aspects of reciprocity found in all those licences, each one presenting an interest: organic reciprocity / reciprocity in act / institutional reciprocity / internal-external reciprocity.

Organizing internal reciprocity around two Creative Commons licences

The first need for La Coop des Communs was to determine the status of its own productions, knowing that the association is organized in working groups dedicated to given themes. In a first way, to give effect to the idea of reciprocity, it was decided that participants in the working groups could benefit from the productions of these groups under CC-BY-SA licence (thus, with the possibility of modification and commercial use and a share alike obligation), while these same productions would be opened to third parties under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

This solution is based on the idea of the FairShares project, building on the proven Creative Commons licences, to avoid increasing the “proliferation of licences”. Personally, I have further doubts about the possibility for a new licence to break into a landscape already saturated with proposals, in which certain tools, such as Creative Commons, have become “standards”. It’s better to use existing licences to build a “reciprocity system” than to start from scratch.

Otherwise, this vision enhances the link between “reciprocity in action” and “institutional reciprocity” and, I think, it’s the only sure way to proceed. It’s too difficult to define abstractly what is a “contribution to the Commons”, because Commons themselves are too different from one another. Only individually, each Common can appreciate what could be a significant contribution to its functioning. As for La Coop des Communs, a person, who wants to strongly benefit from resources produced within the association, has to contribute to its operation by participating in one of its working groups. Maybe other Commons would have another way of defining “reciprocity in action”, but it seems to me that we could never escape an “institutional” definition of the contribution, for each Common.

Bridging the gap with SSE through “limited profit” criterion

By default, La Coop des Communs’ resources are made available under CC-BY-NC-ND licence, but it was decided that outside entities will be exempt from prior authorisation and royalties if they have non-profit or limited-profit activity.

The concept of limited profit is part of the SSE’s rich legal legacy, and, as a criterion, has several interests. It already allows to overcome some of the limits of the NC (non-commercial use) criterion of the Creative Commons. The latter, on which there is endless debate in the Open Source Software communities, is often accused of being too vague. But in reality, it’s not: it is rather extremely broad, since it is triggered when a resource leads to monetary compensation or the search for a “commercial advantage”. Therefore, it’s only a criterion of “commerciality”, excluding the purpose of the use and its context, which means that administrations or associations may be subject to it.

From this point of view, the advantage of the non-profit or limited-profit criterion is to reintroduce an “organic” logic into the assessment of the use. Indeed, legally, these are entities that will be recognized as for profit or limited profit. However, the sphere of limited-profit also overlaps with SSE: it applies, for example, to associations working in the Social economy or companies such as SCOP, SCIC and ESUS companies.

In addition, entities know with a good level of confidence if, whether or not, they are in the limited-profit sphere. Indeed, originally used by the tax authorities, this criterion enable to grant tax deductions and the associations know whether they are in limited profit compared to the tax system applicable to them. It’s even easier for entities such as SCOPs, SCICs and ESUS companies, because they are intrinsically considered to be in the sphere of limited-profit, because of their operating principles (this is particularly clear in the ESS definition adopted in the Hamon law). And we can add that this criterion also has an international dimension, because although the definition of limited-profit may vary from country to country, it can be found in most legislation. The result is therefore comparable to copyright in Creative Commons licences: certain “pivot” concepts on which licences are built (originality, reproduction, representation, moral rights, collective management, etc.) may vary from country to country, but this simply affects the interpretation of licences and not their validity
The use of non-profit or limited-profit criterion seems to me very interesting to test, because it is perhaps a way to overcome the excessive rigidity showed by the Peer Production Licence. Perhaps it could be a way to make a legal link between Communes and SSE, which will enable “Open Cooperativism” to take shape.

Still some limitations, but a potential to explore

Coopyright may not be a perfect proposal, but in my view, it has the potential to reopen the debate on reciprocal licences on a better basis than it has been engaged to date. And, in my opinion, it is urgent to resume this debate. More and more actors of the SSE and the Commons are meeting on the major question of “reinforced reciprocity”, but, for now, they don’t have effective legal tools to implement it.
Coopyright can probably contribute to this process and will be currently tested by La Coop des Communs, especially within its project “Plateformes en Communs” (a set of cooperative platforms which recognize themselves in the notion of Commons and includes a working group on legal issues which I am in charge of leading). Please, also note that the text of the Coopyright proposal has been posted on GitLab for comments.

For now, the main limit of Coopyright will probably lie in the field of objects where it could be applied. Built on a combination of Creative Commons licences, it is not suitable, for example, for software because Creative Commons licences were designed for intellectual works, such as music, movies, text, photos, etc. and the Creative Commons Foundation itself recommends not to use them for software. Moreover, it should not be difficult to adapt dedicated software licences to implement the same principles, but this work remains to be done. Otherwise, Creative Commons licences also have limitations when applied to hardware objects (I already mentioned this on this blog) and Coopyright itself does not allow exceeding this limit.

For now, another restriction is that Coopyright has been developed to meet the specific needs of Coop des Communs and this directly reflects on how “internal reciprocity” is expressed in the text (extended rights in return for participation in its working groups). But it would be quite simple, for entities that would like to use this tool, to modify the basic text to express otherwise what they consider to be a “significant contribution to their activity”, opening the benefit to more re-use rights than the default license. Coopyright text itself is under CC-BY-SA licence and, therefore, everyone could adapt it, according to its needs.

Finally, I think we could add a layer so that “reciprocity in action” could be recognised within a network of entities that have the same values. For now, this “reciprocity in act” is assessed in relation to the contribution to a Common (in this case, La Coop des Communs). Imagine a group of entities decide to use Coopyright for their resources: they could then want to “form a coalition” and, in a spirit of solidarity, consider that the contribution to one of the members of the network would open user rights on the resources of the other members. This would lead to the creation of a “common pot” of resources, with a “networked” appreciation of what “reciprocity in action” would be, on the basis of cross-institutional assessments.

In short, there are probably many things to imagine from these first ideas and feel free to share yours under this post or go do it on GitLab.

PS: one last thing, which is not completely insignificant. A license needs a logo to get visibility. If someone is able to imagine a logo that would express Coopyright’s values and operating principles in a graphic form, do not hesitate to leave a comment!

Photo by Jonathan Lidbeck

The post Coopyright: at last a reciprocal licence to make the link between Commons and ESS? 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

The post Thoughts from Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Launched last December, AnyShare is a complete cooperative in that it allows multiple stakeholder groups to become members, vote, participate in decision-making processes, and receive profits. The stakeholders in the AnyShare Cooperative are founders, investors, employees, and community members. All receive dividends and a vote in the annual general meeting. A fifth stakeholder — the environment — receives dividends and a board position.

We talked to Eric Doriean, co-founder and operations chief, about AnyShare’s journey to become a FairShares platform cooperative.

Darren Sharp: How was AnyShare set up?

Eric Dorien: AnyShare was formed after a multi-year collaboration between its co-founders, Rob Jameson, Alison Gianotto, David Linnard, and myself, to find ways to unlock the abundant value that exists in our communities.

Our journey began with building an online platform called Mass Mosaic. The idea behind Mass Mosaic was to gather the needs and resources of as many people as possible and to create matches between them. The site grew to 15,000 users, but never had the critical mass to make diverse matches possible and truly unlock the abundance around us. We did find, however, that the groups on Mass Mosaic did work, as critical mass wasn’t needed for their success. It was with this knowledge that we refocused our efforts to build software to empower groups and communities. Late last year, AnyShare was launched and you can now start a free trial of the software on our website.

Long before meeting my beloved co-founders, I was fortunate enough to be an early employee of an internet start-up. In my time there, the business grew, and we listed through an IPO. It was then when my eyes started to open to the problems with unfettered growth and profits for shareholders being the only goal.

As time went on, I continued to learn about the extractive nature of business as usual and was attracted to the cooperative model. There were issues with cooperatives, in raising capital and not sharing the decision-making and value created with all the stakeholders that a technology-oriented business would impact. I began to imagine a hybrid cooperative that would create a business structure that would appease what had become a long list of requirements for me.

This is when I came across the FairShares Multi-Stakeholder Cooperative model. The FairShares model has four default stakeholder groups: founders, investors, labor, and customers. For our cooperative, the labor stakeholder group became the employee class and the customer stakeholder group, became the community class. It took a lot of time and effort from both our team and the FairShares team, but we are now very proud to be the first U.S.-based and technology focused FairShares enterprise.

What are the steps you went through to set up your organizational structure?

The first step in our transition to becoming a cooperative was for the co-founders to agree it was the right action to take. I had discussed the possibility of a multi-stakeholder cooperative with my co-founders at different occasions and educated them on what I had learned over many years for why they were necessary.

This was before Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider coined the phrase Platform Cooperative and sparked the movement behind it. So it did take time for the others to understand the need for it, as it was a foreign concept to traditional start-ups.

When I came across FairShares, from one line in the Commons Transition ebook from Michel Bauwens and co., it was the final piece of the puzzle for the co-founders to agree it was the right move forward. FairShares being an external third party with a highly evolved model, legitimized the idea. Then came the work to make it happen.

FairShares has default bylaws, which needed to be updated to include what we knew was necessary from our experiences in growing high tech businesses. As this was the first time being done in the U.S., we also had to investigate that everything within the bylaws was able to be done legally. It took as nearly a year to get these pieces in place. It all took much longer because we were the first to do it.

Our existing bylaws as a Delaware C Corp, required director approval to enact the new bylaws. A board meeting was called and after the affirmative vote to change them, I have to admit I felt a real sense of achievement. This was an important milestone, but then the real work began to build a business that achieved our mission and become a beacon of light of how to run fairer companies in the future.

Why did you choose the FairShares multi-stakeholder co-operative model?

My personal experience in business had taught me the need for raising capital. Traditional cooperatives are usually limited to members founding capital or finances raised through a loan of some sort. Unfortunately, there are too many stories of cooperatives being under capitalized, especially in their early days and failing before they get to a stage where the benefits of a Cooperative help them thrive. This is solved by the investor stakeholder group within FairShares, which allows raising capital through investment, whilst still embracing the cooperative principles.

Most cooperatives members are either workers or customers. We wanted both of these groups in our business to be part of the cooperative. The employee and community stakeholder classes in our cooperative allow us to do just that.

One of the principles of the FairShares model is to license intellectual property under a Creative Commons license. We added a clause that allowed us to release software under the open-source license of our choosing. This allows us to contribute to the global commons, whilst building a profitable business. It is something we hope to see become the gold standard for profit-making ventures.

The experience FairShares Association has brought to the table and built into the model, is second to none. This combined with the fact that FairShares is an external body to ourselves, was a big factor in choosing the FairShares model for our cooperative.

How did you develop your model rules and constitution?

The FairShares bylaws can be modified as needed beyond the founder, investor, labor, and customer stakeholder groups and the requirement of Creative Commons or open intellectual property. We had to decide details around areas such as percentages for dividends and voting for the stakeholder groups had to be decided. It was also necessary for us to modify a range of clauses to enable us to help us develop as a high-tech business.

Perhaps the biggest deviation from the default FairShares bylaws, was our decision to add a fifth stakeholder group. We added the environment as a stakeholder group. After we reach 500 cooperative members, there will be a board position whose role is solely focused on the business’s environmental impact. Also, two percent of the dividends are payable to environmental and nature causes before the other stakeholder groups are paid their dividend.

As the first U.S.-based FairShares enterprise, there was a considerable amount of effort put into making sure that everything in our bylaws was legal in the U.S.

A big part of this effort focused on the Blue Sky laws in the U.S., which had impacts on the employee and community classes being able to purchase investor stock up to a percentage of their contribution.

Can you share worksheets, templates, and policy documents?

Our current bylaws can be downloaded from our support website. They are Creative Commons licensed and can be modified and shared as per the terms of that license.

To date, most of our focus internally has been to develop our software and build our business. As time goes by, we will put resources into documenting processes and what we learn for others to learn from.

Are you really the first business in the U.S. where all people can have a voice and stake in the collective outcome? There are many multi-stakeholder co-ops in the U.S. already.

We believe that we are the first “complete” cooperative in the U.S. Beyond giving a voice and a stake in the collective outcome of the cooperative; we’ve added the environment and nature stakeholder class as well. Every business has an impact on the environment, and it was important to us that our environmental impact is a positive one.

The research we undertook before publicly stating [that] we are the first U.S. “complete” cooperative was extensive. We communicated with the National Cooperative Business Association, the Cooperation Works listserv, the Library of Congress, and other academic and development bodies. We asked if there is record of any other cooperative in the U.S. including all stakeholder groups. So far, there has been none presented, so [we] are comfortable saying we’re the first.

If anybody can think of another stakeholder class we haven’t included, we’d love to hear from you.

Header photo: Screenshot of AnyShare website

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Michel Bauwens is a theorist in the emerging field of P2P theory and director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organisation of researchers collaborating in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including his seminal thesis, The Political Economy of Peer Production.

In the run up to the Open 2017 – Platform Co-ops conference in London, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley, from The Open Co-op explores some of Michel’s ideas.

Avoiding the exploitation of the commons and open source peer production

OSB: At The Open Co-op we believe that open source software is an essential component of the Platform co-op / solidarity economy. However, some of the developers I speak to are now less inclined to publish their code openly, since they have seen large corporations incorporate their code and go on to build multi million pound businesses… This makes me wonder if there is a need to move on from simply “open source” by creating a new licensing system, similar to the Creative Commons for artistic works, in order to ensure that developers can stipulate the ways in which their code may be used, and by whom, in order to ensure the commercial world does not exploit open source.

MB: This is of course a very valid concern. But we have to ask a few questions. First, we have to recognise that people have to make a living and free software developers, like others, can be paid for their work as employees or freelancers, independent of the ‘open’ nature of the code. 75% of Linux Core developers are paid for example, and the Fair Use Economy report calculated that one sixth of GDP and 17 million workers are making a living around shared knowledge economies. That’s not trivial.

My point is that work is a rival good, and has a price, but that knowledge is naturally abundant and thus privatising it is inherently problematic.

Which is why we propose a novel solution, one which combines both a full commitment to share knowledge, and a demand for reciprocity towards the commons in the case of commercialisation. This is what we call the ‘copyfair’ principle, and it avoids the reality of free software, which is that, ‘the more free the license, the more private the economy around it’.

To my mind, we thus continue to write shared code, but we create ethical business coalitions around it, and we re-introduce reciprocity into the private market mechanisms.  Examples of this are the practice of the FairShares Association, which has one CC non-commercial license for everyone, and a commercial license for those who pay a membership fee (this is their ‘reciprocity’ requirement).

The Peer Production License used by some publishers is another. I take this as an ethical requirement: while we all have to make a living, and I respect the freedom of everyone to use moderate IP protection as a free choice, I believe that withholding vital productive knowledge for humanity is not the right thing to do.

OSB: OK, some people get paid to write open code – others do not, but I believe for open code to flourish we need to actively encourage developers to publish openly and that is not going to continue to happen if their work gets blatantly exploited for financial gain by others.

Having read more about the PPL now I understand its structure and objectives and admire the way it aims to encourage reciprocation if a conventional capitalist business reaps financial dividends from the open source work. I also understand the valid objections to limiting the flow of ‘free knowledge’ and information.

However, I personally feel we are in a kind of battle here, to either fix, out-evolve or supersede the ‘extractive’ economy asap, if we do not want humanity to become extinct. And I do not see the elites that wield power today giving up on their vested interests any time soon so, to me it seems, we would be wise to place limits on how, and where, and in exchange for what, our work can be used.

As Nathan Schneider put it to me in a recent email:
“as long as there have been commoners, they have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords.”

We need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. 

MB: We have to be defensive, but I think more importantly we need to organise ourselves so that the ‘value’ of our work can be re-invested in our livelihoods, communities and resources. This is why it can never be a purely defensive game, or even trying to get more of the piece of the pie, but it requires a reorganisation of our modes of production and exchange.

Our proposal at the P2P Foundation is threefold at the micro-economic stage: first, we need to build productive communities around our commons, and declare our value sovereignty; this means deciding to distribute value differently, ‘generatively’; this requires a second step, creating generative entrepreneurial coalitions, so that we are commoners adding to the commons, but also cooperators making a living. And this requires also of course building meta-networks, between them.

Obviously, this takes time, and it took capital 400 years to consolidate itself with all the institutions it needed. The problem of course, is: we don’t have that time, but perhaps, because of the acceleration of learning through mutual networks, we can achieve it in 40.

It’s clear from this, given the urgencies of climate change and ecological destruction, that we can never wait for these prefigurative processes to go on on their own. This is why we also need to ally the prefigurative forces with social movements and emancipatory political forces, and we need to infuse them with the models of the commons, and ‘liberate’ them from their exclusive reliance on private vs state.

By building such an alliance we can then also politically transform social and economic institutions and have them evolve in the direction of the prefigurative society that we are building. Free knowledge is hugely important in this context, because under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created.

Think of how patenting of solar and electric cars led to a 30 year stagnation of their necessary development. This is why we have to square the circle, continue to share code, but create vehicles for livelihood creation around it. We must also transform the institutions so that we can have a ‘partner state’ which can ’empower and enable personal and social autonomy’, just as the FLOSS Foundations are doing that at the micro-level. We need commons-based, commonified public institutions. Nobody said it would be easy.

Under capitalism, we treat rare resources as if they were infinite, and we treat abundant resources, as if they were scarce. So we destroy the planet, but withhold the knowledge necessary to solve the problems thus created. 

Can Co-ops create increased value?

OSB: I was inspired to hear you talk about the increased value that can be generated by co-ops and platform co-ops when members are all owners and value is not syphoned off, and away from the organisation, by third parties such as external investors. To me this is one of the main benefits of platform co-ops which I feel has not been adequately explained. Do you know of any real-world examples that prove this to be the case?

MB: Yes, I fully agree with that basic premise that we need platform cooperatives that are generative towards their community and commons and the resources they draw from. Cooperatives of course have a long history of proving they work and employ more people worldwide than the multinational enterprises, and we also know from studies that cooperative startups do a lot better than venture-based startups (who, for each unicorn they produce, destroy 99 other companies). This being said, platform cooperatives are very new and so it is still difficult to say with confidence how they will work. But Nathan Schneider’s Internet of Ownership site identifies more than 250 of them, and, to take just one of them,  Stocksy, a platform co-owned by professional photographers, seems to do quite well.

So, it needs to happen, and the established cooperatives and ethical and solidarity finance absolutely needs to wake up to the necessity of playing a vital supportive role. I stress another condition though, which is the concept of ‘open cooperatives’. My critique is that traditional coops end up working for their members in the competitive capitalist economy, and tend to slowly take over the practices of corporations, up to the point of being demutualised sometimes.

An open cooperative in contrast, would be multi-stakeholder, which means that a ride-hailing coop might be co-owned and governed not just by the drivers, but also by the users and other stakeholders; that it actively (through its own statutes and rules) is engaged in producing common goods (not just the platform itself, but say a commitment to open source code for example); and that it has an outlook and structure committed to achieving some social or environmental purpose.

Marjorie Kelly, in her book on the ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’ has outlined five major characteristics of ‘generative enterprise’ that I think we should be heeding.

She writes that:

“In ownership design, there are five essential patterns that work together to create either extractive or generative design: purpose, membership, governance, capital, and networks.

• Extractive ownership has a Financial Purpose: maximizing profits. Generative ownership has a Living Purpose: creating the conditions for life.
• While corporations today have Absentee Membership, with owners disconnected from the life of enterprise, generative ownership has Rooted Membership, with ownership held in human hands.
• While extractive ownership involves Governance by Markets, with control by capital markets on autopilot, generative designs have Mission-Controlled Governance, with control by those focused on social mission.
• While extractive investments involve Casino Finance, alternative approaches involve Stakeholder Finance, where capital becomes a friend rather than a master.
• Instead of Commodity Networks, where goods are traded based solely on price, generative economic relations are supported by Ethical Networks, which offer collective support for social and ecological norms.”

I think that is an excellent summary of where we need to be heading.

Inter Co-op cooperation and decentralised, distributed currencies

OSB: Principle 6, co-operation between co-ops, seems to provide huge scope for recycling the value that is generated within the co-op community, but doesn’t seem to have been particularly effective to date. Do you have any thoughts on why that might be and how co-ops could improve inter-co-op cooperation?

Relatedly, in a recent article for oD I suggested that “Decentralised distributed currencies will change the way our economy works by re-routing flows of capital. For example, if I could earn “co-op coins” in one co-op and spend them in the next, as a co-op member I would be incentivised to do so, since I also receive a share of the profits.”

How practical do you think that idea is? And what role do you see for decentralised distributed currencies in a new, generative economy?

MB: Cooperatives that compete, with each other and other private companies, and for the benefit of their own members, have historically adapted to capitalist practices, and they had to, given that capitalist competition drives down the cost and prices of the products they need; this has made inter-cooperative cooperation difficult to achieve, with some exceptions. I don’t think it can improve in the same context. But making cooperation ‘commons-centric’ changes the logic, since such commons increase the productive capacity of participating cooperatives. This is why capital has moved massively to the platform models and why it has been such a historical mistake of the cooperative movement to have missed the boat in this shift.

I also believe distributed currencies may play a role in this shift. The way I see it is the following: cooperative commons coalitions need to declare their ‘value sovereignty’; this means that, even as they may be dependent on external capital logics, internally, they can change the mode of distribution of value according to their own value logics, using contributory accounting mechanisms. And within this context, they can express their own new value logics, using new types of currencies, like for example backfeed.cc aims to do. I recommend your readers to check out our latest report on ‘Value in the Commons’ which analyses developments in open and contributory value accounting, based on 3 in-depth case studies.

OSB: The terminology you use here is a little new to me. If I understand you correctly, you are saying that, even though a co-op may generate income in GBP, for example, they can derive their own methods of distributing value (above and beyond just the GBP) to their members and other stakeholders, using their own distributed currencies. Is that what you are saying?

MB: I am saying two things. First, coops indeed need sovereign currencies as income, which they can distribute not just as wages, but also as contributive income, according to their own rules. Second, and complementarily, they can also recognise other value than what is recognised as ‘commodity’ or market value by the external market, and create other tokens for that, which can be used in inter-cooperative networks. These tokens are similar to complementary currencies that are used locally, but in this case, we are speaking of ‘territories of value circulation’, that are not geographically determined, but exist through the network of value exchanges over the network.

OSB: I read with interest how Open value Networks present a viable model for profit sharing in which a ‘value accounting system’ computes equity in proportion to contributions automatically, removing the pain from the profit sharing process. Could that be another example of “declaring value sovereignty” you describe above?

MB: Sensorica is indeed an example of value sovereignty, and there can be other forms, and of course, that is the point of value sovereignty, that it can be diverse. Sensoria’s aim is to create a much more direct linkage between commons contribution and market income. My own preference though is to create cooperatives around the commons, as an intermediary institution.

Is the blockchain really the holy grail for distributed organisations and currencies?

OSB: backfeed.cc seems interesting, and especially powerful if it can be understood and deployed as intended, but I am not convinced that the blockchain is either required, or the best underlying infrastructure, for new forms of distributed currency. For example, the block chain goes to great lengths to anonymise transactions, so that trade made may be conducted anonymously but, as we have seen so clearly in our modern economy (and as the Prisoners’ Dilemma illustrates so well), people do not behave so well in one-time, anonymous transactions.

On the contrary, when transactions are with real people, that we grow to know, people tend to behave more co-operatively and even develop deeper, more valuable ties based on mutual aid and solidarity. Reputation seems like the key ingredient here, as opposed to anonymity. What do you think about the current obsession with basing all these types of new, distributed, organisations and systems on the blockchain? And what do you think about the idea of an alternative system, based on open identity and reputation being more suited (and potentially more valuable to) the p2p / collaborative economy?

MB: I agree with your critique. The blockchain, let’s not forget, comes from the design of the Bitcoin currency, which is an anarcho-capitalist, “austrian economics” inspired design. It represents ‘ultracapitalism’ if you will, the urge to commodify everything. It presumes atomised and isolated individuals that contract out with each other, and dislikes any collective governance. So, while I think the blockchain can be inserted in other designs that do not make these limiting assumptions about human nature and motivations, it is not absolutely necessary.

My own beef with backfeed is that it assumes human work needs incentives, but the key assumption I make is the opposite, i.e. that commons work is driven ‘intrinsically’, and so there is a danger, that incentivising may actually ‘crowd out’ commoning behaviour to replace it with competition for scarce tokens. But of course we need to experiment, and backfeed is versatile enough to allow for very different designs adapted to various communities.

Ownership is directly related to the real value of an organisation

OSB: I developed the diagram (below) during discussions with Douglas Rushkoff, which attempts to illustrate the direct relationship between ownership and “real” value of an organisation to society. How true do you think this illustration is?

MB: The graphic is fine for me, in my own language, which comes from Marjorie Kelly’s ‘Emerging Ownership Revolution’, which we discussed above, I distinguish ‘extractive’ from ‘generative’ approaches; this could be added to the graphic. For example, the VC model extracts value from human communities and natural resources, for the benefit of a minority of shareholders (example, Uber destroys the potential of ride-sharing to diminish the numbers of cars, by making drivers compete for customers); while cooperative models attempt to add value to the communities and resources they work with.

What is democracy and how can we make improve on the present, undemocratic system

OSB: You seem to be a fan of democracy, as am I, however, I’m not sure I have ever experienced it. What do you think real democracy is?

MB: I think there are two competing visions of democracy, one which is rule by the people directly, as in the Athenian model (though it was restricted to male citizens), the other is through a set of institutions which have the contrary aim of actually restraining such direct power, as documented in the book by Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, “Athens on Trial: the Anti-Democratic tradition in Western thought “.

My focus is on the first model. The problem is that after 200 years of the second model, the primary areas of our life, like school and work, are not democratic, and so the basic problem is that we expect democratic behaviour from people (citizens / residents) who have basically never exercised it. This is one reason I favour the commons model, because it is based on self-governing communities, so it is a training school for democracy like no other.

OSB: When you say ‘the commons model’ what exactly do you mean? Where can we see a commons model acting as “a training ground for democracy like no other”?

MB: I follow the traditional definition of the commons, i.e. a shared resource, managed by a community according to its own norms. There are plenty of physical commons in the Global South, i.e. 85% of Africans still depend on them, less so in the West, but there are in fact more than we think. In Galicia, Spain, one third of the land is still commons and run by commons associations. But today, we see the explosion of digital commons (shared knowledge resources are the basis of one sixth of GDP in the US economy), and urban commons. There has been a tenfold increase of citizen initiatives in Flanders in the last ten years, and a similar exponential explosion in the Netherlands, and many of these initiatives involve creating commons as part of their practice. Guy Standing’s book on the precariat, has documented the deep linkage of precarious workers with networks characterised by commons.

I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything.

The innovation of peer production moreover, which is now actively pursued in the Italian model promoted by LabGovand LabSus, is the realisation that not everybody has to decide on everything, we simply have no time to be involved in everything at the personal level, but to give privileged space to the already engaged citizens, with the appropriate control mechanisms by other stakeholders, including ‘society’ as a whole.

OSB: So do you favour liquid democracy, or any kind of delegative democracy?

MB: I favour a mixture, which needs to be experimented with. I do not believe a complex society can solely run on direct democracy, and it is not realistic to demand of people to be involved with everything. Thus we need to build new layers of deliberative democracy and participation, on top of improved representative democracies, which can also include new lottery systems for such presentation, as for example presented in Melenchon’s proposal for a newConstituent Assembly and 6th Republic in France.

Right now, we (the human race) are at the cusp of combining the old representative model, which is no longer functioning for different reasons, and an added layer of experimental more direct democratic models. See also what is happening in Voralberg, the Austrian region, with civic councils for examples; or the Bologna Regulation in Italian cities, which gives citizens direct policy power to instantiate commons governance projects.

I think the essence is now experimentation, and different regions/countries/cities might opt for different contextual mixes of collective decision-making. Of course, I am also very aware of potential counter-tendencies with an authoritarian capitalism under the leadership of right-wing radicals such as the Trump-ian forces. It’s going to be a context between the two models, while we know the status-quo is no longer functioning.

OSB: Since members of co-ops and platform co-ops get to vote on everything and anything by which they are affected, a society populated by a multitude of co-ops might provide an alternative system of governance.

A co-op of co-ops could perform organisational duties at any scale whilst ensuring democratic governance by pushing decisions down to the lowest possible levels. What do you think about the possibility of a completely new system of democracy, like the above, superseding the existing system?

MB: I think we should be wary of uniform systems, since, if anything goes wrong with it, there is no backup. This was the argument of Rosa Luxemburg against the abolition in Russia of the parliament (during the Russian Revolution), she realised that if anything went wrong with the worker councils, there would be no other power able to create a balance, and she was proven right. The model you describe is being experimented in Rojava I believe.

But the cooperative model has its limits in my view, in that it easily functions as private property or ‘worker capitalism’, in relation to the rest of society. This is why I stress the model of open cooperatives, in which coops are also directly aligned with the production of common good, in the form of ‘commons’, through their own statutory obligations. In general, I favour a pluri-form model of democracy, in which cooperative democracy has its place, along with others, to make sure there is institutional diversity.

OSB: So, would I be right in saying you think that the most practical way to expand democracy is for citizens to propose solutions and organise around areas of shared interest (or physical or digital commons), to make their voices known and to influence our existing ‘representative democracies’ in the hopes that our representatives make better decisions?

Democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us.

MB: No that is not entirely correct. On the one hand, democracy has to be first of all a practice that is integrated in our lives, not something just like an election, which is like electing which elite is going to govern us (election = elite, both words have the same roots, and the greeks saw elections as the aristocratic principle and the lottery as the democratic principle); the commons, defined as shared resources that are governed by communities according to their own rules and norms, are a good way to achieve this, i.e. as we learn and work, we practice democracy.

Representative democracy needs to exist to cover wider territorial and functional units, but we are at the threshold where mere representation is no longer enough, and so this is the time to augment it with new techniques, to be experimented with, and this may involve participatory, deliberative, liquid feedback type, lotteries etc.

 John Heron explains well what chance of change I believe we can achieve, he once wrote:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

1. autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
2. narrow democratic cultures which practice political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
3. wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degrees of wider kinds of participation;
4. commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour.”

Heron adds that “These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

1. Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;
2. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
3. Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;
4. The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour”

Visions of the future

OSB: Finally, I’d like to ask about your vision. We are often exposed to the vision of a world full of hate and extremism and scarcity but rarely hear about a positive alternative. If you were in charge, what changes would you make to help speed up the transition to a collaborative, generative, sustainable, economy?

MB: I have a rather tragic vision for change, i.e. change happens when we must. At this stage where we have a world civilisation which is based on extraction, where social inequalities lead to authoritarian right wing populism and the planet is endangered in all kinds of ways, humanity will do what it has always done, i.e. create popular and spiritual movements that aim to limit extraction and discipline the extractors.  Mark Whitaker, who has done a 3,000 year comparative review of how civilisations react to meltdowns shows a pattern. This means going to a system that stabilises social unrest. This is where peer to peer dynamics come in today, and that needs massive mutualisation ( = pooling, = commons) of physical and knowledge resources.

Thus any successor system will need to comprise revived commons as a way to drastically reduce the material footprint.

If the medieval monks mutualised knowledge and infrastructure through monasteries and feudalism re-localised production, so today we have free software / open design, the sharing / access based economy to mutualise idle resources and recycle / upcycle and distribute local manufacturing based on demand, to relocalise.

You know the analogy of imaginal cells in the caterpillar; the cells who identify with the caterpillar are in panic, because the system is dying, but the cells who identify with the butterfly and carry its DNA know that it is a transition. Similarly today, we see seed forms emerging to solve the systemic crises, and the P2P Foundation is dedicated to observing them, analysing them and to think through where this can lead us, and be a catalyst for that change.

OSB: That’s a great analogy. The Open Co-op has similar objectives and we will be discussing all of the above themes at Open 2017 in London In February. Thank you for your time and all your thoughts Michel, you are an inspiration and the P2P Foundation is an amazing resource for the anyone interested in the transition to a more equitable, sustainable society.

This post was originally published on OpenDemocracy.net. 

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Rory Ridley-Duff is a reader in cooperatives and social enterprise at Sheffield Business School, director of Social Enterprise Europe, and founder of the FairShares Association. They use Loomio to model their governance structure online, for effective, equitable stakeholding.

FairShares Association is a loose network of educators, researchers, and consultants  interested in multi-stakeholder co-ops. We’ve got people in France, Australia, New Zealand, and now in America as well.

There is no way of all meeting face to face, realistically. We use Loomio to keep our discussions alive.

The philosophy of FairShares is to grow more direct forms of democracy (over representative democracy). Because Loomio can have nested groups, you can have high levels of participation from people who are loosely connected, but you can also have people who are on governing bodies.

We like the combination of very open forums where you have have ‘one person one vote’ and open debates, but a group of members could also be making a decision around a change to the constitution, for example.

I think you make better decisions when you have inclusive, democratic processes. Particularly when it’s structured the way that Loomio structures it.

In the European project, we wanted to engage the research team with the wider network. That was a project on work integration in social enterprise, and there were five countries involved. The fact that you could translate text on Loomio was appealing, because people in different countries could write in their own language.

I believe in the integration of users and members of the community into an organisation that has substantial worker involvement or worker control. FairShares is a philosophy for doing that. It can act as a guide to the way you actually constitute your organisation, but I think, more powerfully, it’s a set of principles.

You can have a store who recognises who the founders, users, producers, and supporters. That’s the way that FairShares looks at the world; we organise around those four interest groups. We’ve set up our Loomio to model our governance, with different subgroups, and everybody in the general assembly.

What Loomio does, which email doesn’t do, is give you an audit trail of your decisions. It enables you to function like you’ve got a general meeting on all the time. All of the members get proposals, and they get time to consider and vote on the issues.

Loomio enables people whose voices were normally not heard to exercise their voices more effectively. People who were usually very dominant weren’t as dominant when it was being run through Loomio.

I’m quite hopeful for a technology-enabled sharing economy, where the organisations are cooperatively owned, rather than being owned by absentee investors. We will gradually work toward a genuinely participatory democracy at work. It’s the marriage of technology and the thinking of FairShares that will create the ability for different constituent groups to really bargain with each other as equals.

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In July 2014 I met Margaret Meredith and Catalina Quiroz, organisers of a three-year project to develop education resources for the social economy at York St John University. Both of them had been travelling in South America for three months to learn about the solidarity economy. We first met at the FairShares Association Conference, then again at the Co-operative and Social Enterprise Summer School hosted by Sheffield Hallam University. After four days of discussion, they told me they wanted to include the FairShares Model in a handbook on new co-operativism. This got me thinking about what’s new and its relationship to old co-operativism.

The FairShares Model is a project of Social Enterprise Europe. In this agency, the board recognised that theearliest developments in social enterprise between 1976 to 1982 were rooted in commitments to co-operativevalues and principles: social finance at the Grameen Bank, Banglandesh (1976); social auditing at Beechwood College, Leeds, UK (1978); social co-operatives in Bologna, Italy (1978), and — the exception — social entrepreneurship at ASHOKA, USA (1982). Each initiative developed contributions to practice that we take for granted today. Importantly, they supported projects that combined member ownership with sustainable development goals and social impact measurement. Even the Chief Operating Officer of Unilever, Harish Manwani, argues there is an inexorable move towards a ‘responsible business’ model in which a licence to operate is only granted when an enterprise creates both economic and social value.

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There is no true ambition or justice in a global climate deal that undermines the principles of sharing, equity and justice. But after the ‘COP-out’ negotiations in Paris, there is still every hope that the growing power of the people’s voice can usher in a more equal and sustainable world.

Now that all the world leaders, diplomats, lobbyists, and NGOs have returned home after COP21, environmental campaigners are still taking stock of the new climate deal agreed in Paris. In many ways, the newspaper headlines heralding a ‘major leap for mankind’ and ‘the world’s greatest diplomatic success’ were justified. The aspirational goal to keep temperatures at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels is certainly more ambitious than expected, and much has been made of the ultimate goal of ‘net-zero human emissions’ in the second half of this century.

Despite the fanfare, however, it’s impossible to call the Paris Agreement an actual success in terms of environmental sustainability or global justice. Green groups have widely argued that the 1.5C aspiration is meaningless without concrete measures for hitting it, while the individual emissions reductions promised by world powers will not be sufficient to prevent global temperatures rising beyond 2C. We are still headed for a catastrophic rise of 3C, and even these existing pledges are not legally binding. So far from being ambitious in any real sense, there are no longer binding targets or meaningful carbon cuts obligated on rich countries—which is almost a step backwards from the Kyoto Protocol (itself deemed inadequate in 1997).

There is also no justice in an agreement in which no new money is pledged to help developing countries adapt to climate change and move beyond fossil fuels. The pre-existing pledge of $100 billion per year of climate finance is about one quarter of the sums needed, according to civil society analysis, and this again is non-legally binding and couched in vague language. As campaigners have long reasoned, it is not a question of aid, loans or charity; it is about the historical debt of rich countries to the majority world. Yet this was far from the basis of the Paris negotiations, where the obligation was shifted back onto poor countries and proposals for climate reparations were pushed off limits. At the same time, the final agreement dropped any reference to human rights or Indigenous rights in the main text.

A growing call for ‘fair shares’

On a more positive note, a global call for sharing is now a central theme among civil society activists who focus on environmental justice issues. Indeed the crunch point in the Paris talks involved—as ever—the vexed issue of how to share responsibility for climate change between developed and developing countries. Campaigners have meticulously articulated how fairness and equity is key to the success of any climate negotiations, as reflected in the major ‘fair shares’ civil society review of government pledges to reduce carbon emissions. Demands for rich countries to remember their #FairShares at COP21 was even a rallying cry of protesters who staged actions outside the talks.

As anticipated, the final agreement did not include a clear reference to a global carbon budget as a basis for targets, which is imperative for any discussion about how to fairly share the Earth’s atmospheric space between rich and poor countries. The talks spelled out no vision of equity or fairness; on the contrary, the United States did everything it could to undermine the landmark principle of equity in the UNFCCC negotiations—known as Common But Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities—by using bullying tactics and bribery to get its way.

Instead of addressing the root causes of climate change and committing to the measures needed to reduce inequality and overconsumption, most world leaders continue to sanction an unjust economic system that is fuelled by fossil fuel extraction. There is an obvious contradiction in major industrialised nations signing the Paris deal on one hand, while pushing for environmentally damaging trade deals such as the TTIP and TPP on the other. As widely pointed out, there was no mentioning in the text of the word ‘fossil fuel’ (let alone the need to keep 80% of fossil fuels in the ground), and there was no reference to the global military industrial complex that is next to the fossil fuel industry in its global GHG emissions.

The polluters’ great escape

The latest climate agreement will be remembered in history as “the Polluters’ Great Escape”, according to one progressive analyst, since it weakens the rules on rich countries and promises no fundamental changes in how the global economy is structured. Far from discussing the difficult political, economic and social changes that are needed to tackle climate change in the near and longer term, the door is also opened once again to carbon markets and other false solutions that suit big corporations.

For all these reasons and many others, the real hope for building a more just and sustainable economic system falls ever more firmly on the shoulders of ordinary, engaged citizens. The last words of many environmental activists following COP21 can only be repeated: that the main obstacles to change are not scientific or technical, but social and political. That history will not be made in convention centres and government institutions, but on the streets in massive peaceful protests and direct actions. That we as people of goodwill are not yet strong enough to dismantle the power of global corporations, but there is increasing evidence that the movement for transformative systemic change is growing apace.

So even if the Paris Agreement failed to reflect the principles of sharing, justice and equity in anything near to their true form of global expression, the great challenge of the 21st century—to fairly distribute the planet’s resources within environmental constraints—has never been more clear or urgent.

As STWR’s Mohammed Mesbahi comments: “There are many committed activists who campaign with passion and intelligence about the need to keep fossil fuels in the ground, to switch to renewable energy resources, to protect the commons, to live more simply and so forth. But they are a comparatively small number of people trying to do a job that requires the backing of the whole population. They’re on their own trying to do the job for everyone else, which doesn’t make sense when you listen to the warnings from scientists who say we’re heading for a climate catastrophe. Those scientists are not just talking to the governments: they are talking to us, you and me, the people of the world.

“Every family should be its own government when it comes to environmental issues today. We should become our own presidents and prime ministers who each plays their part in working to save our planet, as if we are all ambassadors for humanity.

“Most of all, we must carry on organising more protest actions, until those protests catch on and get bigger and bigger. We have observed how world leaders make many promises during these global summits, then go home and put on another mask for the business of making profits for global corporations. Hence we have to persist until those politicians understand that their agenda of commercialisation is incompatible with protecting and healing the environment.

“We have to scale up our existing demands for shifting money away from fossil fuels and armaments, towards climate finance and renewable energies. We know we have all the technology, all the ingenuity, all the money. But governments will not shift their priorities without enormous pressure from the public that is expressed through constant and peaceful mobilisations.”

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Enric Duran of the Catalan Integrated Cooperative has taken the time to comment on Michel Bauwens’ recent article on Open Coops, contrasting Bauwens’ proposals with the practical realities already under way in the CIC’s own forward thinking cooperativist environment.

Bauwens’ summary of these proposals include four key proposals which Duran addresses below. To give some context, the four proposals are:

1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good 
2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons
4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

Here are Duran’s comments to each proposal.

1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good 

Enric Duran: In the CIC’s second assembly, a set of general principles were approved:

• General Principles

Then, towards the end of 2013 the following principles were added:

• Ideological Principles

I will now list some of these principles, namely those related to the common good.

From the first part:

Social Transformation

A concern for the common good and for one’s own welfare

Building an inclusive cooperative that encompasses the whole of society

Society

Social justice and equity

Sharing our practices throughout society

Political organization

Democracy: direct, deliberative, participative

From the second part :

a/ Recover common ownership for the benefit of all, with people-centered ownership and control

We have to recover the control of land and the means of production for the common good, enabling its availability through collectivization (communal ownership) for the public good.

b/ Build a cooperative system that is public and self-managed, based upon mutual aid

We work for the common good, to ensure that all of our vital necessities (food, health, housing, education, energy, transportation, etc.) are covered through a truly public system, built by ourselves and based on self-management, cooperating with one another and promoting the values and abilities that are essentially human.

c/ Liberate access to information and knowledge

We share knowledge among us all to build a greater common good.

At the practical level, we need to continue reinforcing our resources (people, self organization, money, spaces…) to expand our activity for the common good.

2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders 

Enric Duran

The CIC has always included all stakeholders, as we welcome all who wish to be included. Ours in an open government model where everyone can be part of meetings and the decision making process with no need to apply for membership.

To this day, the biweekly in-person assemblies have represented the main decision-making space. At the same time, those involved in different commissions and projects — also carried out in open groups — hold more influence over their particular areas of work. People are welcome to participate in the meetings over the Internet, but in-person attendance is required to partake in the decision-making process.

We have, however, discovered the following shortcomings. The level of involvement of those members that don’t attend meetings is minimal. A possible solution would be to include and implement the use of direct democracy tools. We’re aware of the technical availability of these types of tools, but we feel that a broad social/political discussion is needed in order to assess their implementation.

We need to create ways to recognise and uphold in-person participation and involvement in tasks while also recognizing the right of participation by those who aren’t as involved, by means of votes or assessments which could be considered binding at some level. Discussions need to go straight into the CIC’s decision-making spaces.

Otherwise, at the economic level and given that there are no profits to be shared, the kind of open participation described above does not influence the general budget per se, but it could be interesting to think of other manners of economic involvement.

A way to foster this kind of economic involvement could be through a distributed benefit system tied to a simple project, something independent from the general budget. For example, we could create a kind of “fair shares for shop members and users”, where some portion of the common income is distributed among all sellers and users.

3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons

The CIC is committed to the creation of commons at multiple levels.

We are involved in a number of free software projects, such as:

• www.integralces.net
• darkwallet.unsystem.net
• https://wiki.enredaos.net/index.php?title=GestioCI-Desarrollo (For Integral Cooperative management)

However, these types of commons are not conducive to monetary income, because our political views are focused on free sharing.

Therefore, these types of initiatives are financed through crowdfunding campaigns or allocations redistributed from other income streams.

At the regional level, the CIC also offers a number of immaterial services and knowledge related to juridical frameworks and legal management. We consider the legal structure of our cooperative to be a functioning commons that benefits all the projects making use of it at a minimal cost. More than 300 productive projects are already making use of this framework.

The CIC’s involvement in the immaterial sphere also includes projects related to health, education, culture, among others.This is because as a project, the CIC surpasses the traditional role of a cooperative and includes a working, self-organised and open societal model.

Regarding the production of material commons we have some labs, such as Calafou or Macus, but we need to improve their development through consolidation and reinforcement.

All of these processes also need to be economically sustainable and we have a lot of work pending in order to be connected at the global level.

This year, we have created a “technology office” to facilitate communication and networking amongst all the manufacturing projects committed to Open Source manufacturing principles.

We would, however, welcome further ties to other groups involved with the material commons to learn how to collaborate together, specially in the immaterial aspects related to this type of material creation (knowledge, designs, funding).

Additionally, we’re interested in opening a dialogue about land commons. In this area the CIC actively promotes access to land, as well as shared housing, land and working spaces. Currently, there are dozens of rural projects in Catalonia linked to the CIC where people are actively sharing their tools, knowledge and land, taking part in forest restoration practises, etc. We understand the land as a commons and we’re committed to the progressive expansion of land commons in Catalonia.

4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

The CIC is also committed to global change at a social and political level. We are involved in some projects at the global level:

1. integrarevolutio.net/en/
2. radi.ms
3. coopfunding.net/en/ (mostly local for the moment but globally scalable…)

Problem: “Integral Revolution”, the name we chose to describe our project, is not easily understood at an international level, specially for speakers of non-Latin languages. It is also possible that our practises are somewhat too complex to be readily understood.

Solution: We’re thinking about combining the concept behind Integral Revolution with a more easily understood and synergistic concept, such as “Open Cooperativism.” This very article marks a first step in that direction!

We have some contacts and leads of our own, but we’re actively on the lookout for good partners throughout the world in order to have a globally organised network.

Calafou. Image by Lisa Furness

Other improvements to think about in the process of becoming a better open cooperative

• Providing better, local, CIC tools for the people in Catalonia.

Not only do we need to be open, we also need to seem open.

I’ve detected a problem and I feel that we need stronger ties to other, local, collectives working for the common good, as well as other general social movements and to civil society.

It’s very likely that our goals are much too innovative and different, and this causes people to have difficulty understanding what we’re really about. – People frequently confuse us with old-fashioned cooperatives. We need to partake in demonstrative actions which are accessible to most people.

• Improving the CIC’s internal participatory economic system.

These are the types of economic transactions currently taking place in the CIC:

• Between CIC members
• CIC on an individual basis <-> outside CIC
• CIC productive members ->> CIC (quarterly quotes from productive projects that trade outside the CIC)

One important aspect to consider is how to make the last arrow bidirectional.

I am thinking of introducing some type of distributed mechanism, like Fairshares, for certain projects. It would go something like this:

CIC members + outside CIC ->> CIC + CIC members

…in an automatic and decentralized way. The pilot project could take the form of a marketplace; a good, experimental space where users collaborate to create value simultaneously destined for the common budget and for anyone involved. For example, the fees for the transaction could be distributed the following way: 50% for the common pool and 50% for the users.

This could be an important initiative aimed at creating a greater awareness of open cooperativism within the CIC, while also overcoming the problem of client-provider relationships between the Commons-oriented structure and productive projects.

The post Cooperativa Integral Catalana as a living model of open cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In this article, FairShares Association co-founder Rory Ridley-Duff outlines the continuing case for social and economic reform to support a FairShares Model of enterprise. FairShares brand principles change the way that investment activity is understood to ensure that capital is allocated for entrepreneurial, labour and user activities as well as financial contributions.  The result is wealth and power that is shared more fairly.

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Introduction

At the start of 2014, I came across new studies that acted as a powerful reminder of the need for a FairShares Model.  In this article I will describe the most striking of these, then argue that the co?operative and social enterprise movements need to concern themselves with everyone in the ‘bottom’ 80% of the population, not just those in extreme poverty.  They also need to protect the wealth embedded in our natural environment.

I recently came across a YouTube animation that portrays private wealth distribution in the US using data from a study at Harvard University[1]. This tells a completely different story to Shift Change[2], a documentary about social economy in the US and Spain.  While the Harvard study reports that top US CEOs get380 times the average worker’s pay, Shift Change reports that worker co-operatives either adopt equal pay systems or accept small wage differentials sanctioned by the worker-owners.  For example, the ratio between top and lowest paid workers in the Mondragon Co-ops – where there are 100,000 workers – averages just 5:1[3] [4].

The Harvard study claims that 90% of citizens are impoverished by private sector business practices.  The ‘bottom’ 80% owns just 7% of total wealth, while the top 20% has 93%.  Only 10% gain, and the top 1% gain disproportionately.  There is no doubt.  Hayek’s theory that economic freedom leads to a ‘trickle down’ effect is untrue.  It produces a ‘trickle up’ effect instead [5] [6].  But Shift Change shows that where co?operative business models become dominant, wealth is spread more evenly and equitably.  Member-owned businesses more often than not, are as (commercially) successful as their private sector counterparts [7] [8].  That’s where the FairShares Model comes in – it stimulates change to support growth in the social economy.

Most social enterprises focus on the poorest communities.  Whilst important, it is more urgent that we reform systems that exploit and impoverish up to 90% of working people (as well as the environment in which they live).  We need social enterprises for the bottom 90% (everyone impoverished) not just the bottom 10% (the most impoverished).  We also need a way to prevent the top 10% of earners acquiring hegemonic control over investment decisions.  If this task is beyond us, the goals of social enterprise will also be beyond us.

It is not an accident that most people are getting poorer (in both absolute and relative terms).  Studies of company law make it clear than private enterprises are not designed to share power or wealth [9].  Founders fix structures at incorporation to privilege a set of interests (i.e. entrepreneur(s) and financial investors in companies, consumers or workers in single stakeholder co-operatives). Charitable organisations are also inflexible: board and workforce members are subordinate to charitable/social objects set by the founders.

Entrepreneurship research clarifies how enterprises start.  One or more founding members – by design or accident – find opportunities to develop new markets for products and services [10]. If viable, they organise resources to support a business and build socio-technical systems to maintain management control.  Growing enterprises, however, also depend on the goodwill of the workforce, customers (service users) and institutional investors to access the human, social and financial capital needed for sustainability [11].

The key issue is that while we have developed systems for recognising the contribution of financial capital, we do not have adequate arrangements for recognising contributions of intellectual, human, social and natural capital.  To understand why, we have to review the way social norms for constituting joint-stock companies and non-share companies have developed.

There is a connection between business ideology and the arrangements in law by which entrepreneurs acquire share capital (ordinary shares).  They register as directors, then recruit employees to operationalize their ideas. New capital is issued when more financial capital is needed, but not when more intellectual, human, social or natural capital are needed.  In an unadapted CLS, employees and customers are subordinated to the interests of shareholders. They are not invited to be full members or to contribute towards decisions outside their specialist area of expertise [12]. If employees are offered share capital, voting rights are often limited or controlled by trustees who – in many cases – are under no legal obligation to vote in accordance with the wishes of their beneficiaries [13].

The intellectual property created by the workforce is acquired by the Company and controlled by executive managers and directors. In effect, majority shareholders treat intellectual, human, social and natural capital investments by others as if they were additional financial investments by themselves.  They continue to acquire rights to all the property created by the interactions between employees, customers and the natural environment.  This system of enterprise widens the wealth gap between those who own and govern the enterprise, and those who sell their labour to it, or buy goods from it.  Even in the richest countries, wealth inequalities grow wider (unless the state intervenes) [14] and the natural environment is degraded [15].

A typical response to the social problems created by privately owned economies is to create (private) charities and ‘non-profit’ companies using a Company Limited by Guarantee (CLG). This form of incorporation usually involves specifying charitable or social objects that define the purpose(s) of the enterprise. Founders reframe themselves as trustee-directors responsible for allocating resources in pursuit of social goals.

Charitable CLGs do not issue share capital so trustee-directors give up personal rights to the surplus wealth created by the enterprise. Their role (in law) is one of stewardship, ensuring that funds raised are used to further charitable (or social) objectives defined in the Articles of Association. As in a CLS, they employ staff to pursue social goals. Employees are still not (usually) legal members.  They continue to be subordinate to the trustee-directors and give up the (intellectual) property they create.

Do we have to choose between these two models? Three bodies of knowledge suggest we do not. Firstly, there is a global movement backed by the UN to increase responsible use of corporate assets [16]. Secondly, the UN’s International Year of Co-operatives highlighted the global growth of the social economy [17]. Particularly important is the way that the internet has reduced the costs associated with co-operative working.  The upsides of co-operation (intellectual exchange and collaborative decision-making) no longer come with the downsides of democracy (hefty co-ordination costs) [18]. Lastly, more enterprises identify themselves as social, deploying business models that improve human well-being through innovative trading strategies [19].

Creating non-shareholding companies enables the wealthier sections of society to address some symptoms of poverty and exclusion that private enterprises create, but it cannot address the root causes because it changes neither the ownership structure nor governance processes that creates and sustains them. Traditional private / non-profit models continue to institutionalise a division between producers and consumers on the one hand, and entrepreneurs and (social) investors on the other. For this reason, Level 1 of the FairShares Model asks important questions about representation in ownership, governance and management.

FairShares Model – Level 1

As shown above, the FairShares Model is based on an approach to social economy defined by Social Enterprise Europe.  It operates from the assumption that the exclusion of primary stakeholders from member-ownership (i.e. employees, producers, customers and service users) is a cause of contemporary poverty. At Level 2, the answer to each FairShares question suggests the set of corporate arrangements that is most favourable: entrepreneurs get Founder Shares; workforce members get Labour Shares; trading commitments are rewarded with User Shares; and financial capital creation is rewarded with Investor Shares.

FairShares Model – Level 2

This represents a new approach to valuing investments.  When there are surpluses (profits), not only do the providers of financial capital get a return, but also the contributors of other types of capital.  In a FairShares Company, half the capital gain is issued to Labour and User Shareholders as new Investor Shares,while the other half increases the value of existing Investor Shares.  In a FairShares Co-operative, surpluses can be allocated to restricted funds controlled by Labour and User member-owners, who then use their chosen approach to direct democracy to allocate surpluses to social investment projects.

None of this means that the conventional mechanism for allocating shares to external financial investors has to stop.  In a FairShares Company / Co-operative, Investor Shares can be issued to external investors if debt finance is hard to secure.  But, even with this, at least 70% of the wealth accumulated will find its way into the hands (and bank balances) of producers and consumers.  It enriches the ‘bottom’ 90% as much as the ‘top’ 10%.  And if this is not sufficient, FairShares Articles of Association (at Level 3) includes community dividends that act as an asset lock for philanthropic capital if the enterprise is dissolved.

The Articles of Association provided by the FairShares Association are not the only model rules that support FairShares brand principles [20].  But they do represent an ambitious attempt to bring together the most enduring developments in multi?stakeholder ownership, governance and management so that we change the way investments are recognised and valued [21] [22].  The FairShares Model offers a system for ensuring that capital is allocated to different types of contribution so that wealth and power can be more fairly shared.

References

The post The Case for FairShares appeared first on P2P Foundation.