The future of work will be defined by platforms, or so it seems with the “success” stories of the Ubers,  Airbnbs and Taskrabbits developed in a wide range of sectors.

A simple way of defining platforms is that of organizations that connect people, knowledge, and opportunities. These organizations not only minimize resources by sharing them among its users; but the most well-known examples of the so-called “sharing economy” also take the resources of these same users (expertise, time, homes, cars…) and co-opt it as their own supply giving them very little to no power to decide, imposing conditions and preventing contributors from the right of social protection and labor-derived rights we have been enjoying in the past decades.

As the beginning of this post states, most of us will soon no longer work for an employer, but for a series of platforms: “Work” as we know it is disappearing, and we will have the privilege and the challenge to organize our work “flexibly” around gigs.  The estimations predict around 540 M people working in the “gig economy” by 2025, that’s around 15% of the current total global workforce. ²

Can platforms be positive?

Is there any way in which we can build new welfare structures to cover the classic labor-associated benefits or even go beyond these?

How can we turn into positive this new work paradigm that technology is enabling and propelling at a much larger speed than regulations can (or want to) adapt to?

These and many other questions are discussed in the research of the  IFTF  revolving around the topic of positive platforms: “Positive Platforms are systems for on-demand work that not only maximize profits for their owners but also provide dignified and sustainable livelihoods for those who work on them”. ³F

Under this umbrella we developed our research on “Designing positive platforms: a guide for a governance-based approach”.

Positive by design

Our approach is on the design of the governance of the platform, so that the matters of shared power and welfare are dealt with directly and intrinsically, by design.

After studying fifteen examples of platforms (chosen after the criteria of size, scalability, years of existence and shared-value in the network), the research lead us to the following five principles for the design of governance:

The relevant part of the paper, however, is to spur a thorough discussion on certain key elements and come out with customized mechanisms and solutions for each particular platform. This is the case around for “Recognition of the generated value” and  “Welfare”. These two principles trigger a crucial discussion both on the resilience of the platform and what that organization stands for ideologically.

Defining value:  What do we stand for?

The complexity of value lies on its intangibility and its very broad nature ⁴:  value is an individual perception, and, therefore, not really measurable ⁵.  In platforms we talk about generated value: the user’s contribution to the platform. And distributed value: what the user receives from the platform in the form of benefits (because of her contribution).

Probably, no two members of the same platform will perceive value in the same way: this link leads to a mindmap that illustrates the main dimensions of value and gives a quick idea on the complexity of this issue.

The contributors of a platform are, ideally, bound by a common definition of “Values and principles”. Therefore, there will probably be some similarity on what is considered to be “a value-contribution” and a “benefit” received for it. Nevertheless, it remains a challenging process that arises many key-questions:

• Is value (types of contributions) pre-defined by the platform or is left to each individual member to decide?
• What is considered as a value-contribution:   do we use a resource-based logic? (eg: time, expertise, amount of contribution, etc)  or an efficacy-based one? (eg: related to the goal that wanted to be achieved), can we think of other criteria? How do we value “soft” (intangible) contributions like a member “creating a good atmsophere”, or  “being available for others”, or “facilitating collaborative work”, etc?
• What are the benefits that the contributors receive? How is the process of value distribution made transparently?
• What mechanism should be designed to trace and balance value contributions and benefits received?

Creating solutions for welfare: mutualism.

Welfare is one of the main challenges of the gig-economy: in a professional world dominated by platforms that are not employers and with laws that are not adapted to this new reality – leaving continuously more people out of a minimum labor-benefit system – how can platforms be designed to cover these growing needs?

The only possibility is to take welfare in the governance system:  welfare is distributed value (benefit) generated through contributions.

To go on with this discussion, it is necessary to have previously defined what value-contributions are for the platform and the benefits to be received for those;  welfare might (should) be one of those benefits.

Different types of mutualism provide an answer to the need to cover welfare internally.

It’s important to take into account that welfare is understood in a broader sense than labor-benefits including the psychological / social welfare we get by being a part of a community, for example.

Mutualism can be understood as sharing a co-working space, sharing knowledge, pooling any type of resource, even income. Such is the case of Enspiral’s “Livelihood pods” in which income is pooled to provide all members with a stable income and labor benefits throughout the year.

By now, the more trust there is in a community, the more that can be mutualized; unfortunately, this sets huge barriers to scalability in such sensitive matters of sharing resources.  But there is still  an open door: could technological innovation in-hand with social innovation and shared governance models lead to scaled trust? This would allow for larger communities to become more resilient pooling more resources to build their own system within the current global one that threatens the welfare of millions of workers worldwide.

There are more aspects to each principle to be found with numerous examples in the complete research. We invite you to read it and join the conversation on solutions to the gig-economy and to further develop the principles themselves.

We would also like to point out that, while sharing the content of our paper we have heard quite often that it is ideal for initiators / new organizations like platform coops, networks and other hybrids that might be starting out. Paradoxically though, we find that there is a burning need to work on the resilience of many of the already existing platform coops, networks and hybrids. These organizations are for sure facing other challenges such as financiation and technical development; nevertheless, caring for welfare is key for the resilience of the community undertaking the project. Even more important and more challenging for organizations that envision and work for a new system, but have to survive in the current one while being as coherent as possible with that vision.

Governance is the heart of an organization, it should hold and irradiate the common agreement that the members of that organization have gotten to. For that end, governance design and addressing key issues such as “value and welfare” are a “must” so that platforms geared towards the common good and that want to impact positively the future of work can achieve their vision.

^{1. [Chase, Robin (2015) https://wtfeconomy.com/everything-that-can-become-a-platform-will-become-a-platform-216bcfb89855 ]}

^{2. [https://datos.bancomundial.org/indicador/SL.TLF.TOTL.IN ]}

^{3. [https://medium.com/institute-for-the-future/hacking-the-future-of-work-69454b344eb9 ]}

^{4. [Proportioned to us by Ben]}

^{5. [Sensorica]}

Photo by szwerink

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Going local puts more focus on what’s really important: friends and family, community, good food, clean environment.

This 2-minute animated video from our friends at Local Futures offers a succinct and accessible intro to localization.

As the narrator explains, localisation fosters community, creates more and better jobs, reduced inequality and cuts pollution. In this way it is the perfect antidote to corporate globalisation.

In the current political climate, we’d like to note that nationalism is not in any way the same as localization, and that corporate globalisation is not in any way the same as global cooperation. As the old sustainability maxim says, think global act local!

The post Going Local: the Solution-Multiplier (A short introduction to economic localization) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It covers three important trends in 2016:

* Making sense and countering the Trump Insurgency

* The struggle for the appropriate scale of a new world order: Localization, Global Nomadic Structures, and the Subsidiarity of Material Production

* The P2P Infrastructural Revolution continues: 2017 will be the year of pilots

Please note that the companion article in our wiki has all the necessary links and documentation to the source material, which we will add here soon as time permits.

For purposes of comparison, you may want to re-check last year’s overview here.

Michel Bauwens:

Trend 1: Making sense and countering the Trump Insurgency

It is very hard to characterize 2016 from an internal perspective to the commons, in part because 2015 was such a stellar year of new developments. To my mind as a privileged observer, it has been more of a year of consolidation, and so, I felt quite doubtful when Steve Bosserman proposed to call 2016 a pivotal year for the Commons Transition. But, it makes more sense when we take a external or geo-strategic point of view. Indeed, from the point of view of the existing dominant world system, 2016 has very likely been a pivot year. While 2008 can be seen as a economic proof of the collapse of the neoliberal model, it is really only 2016 which truly deserves the characterization of “Peak Neoliberalism”. It is not just that world trade is in retreat, but that core groups of the population are now rejecting the model, not just from the left anymore (the rapid rise of Syriza and Podemos come to mind), but from the right. Hence 2016 has definitely been the year of the loss of faith in the global neoliberal world order. (Of course, we’re not implying that reaching a Peak, actually means the end, it is just the ‘beginning of the end’.) There are of course forces, such as the Economist, which will be wedded forever to the global oligarchy. But the main visible reaction is now a return to ‘national protectionism’. Of course, peak neoliberalism doesn’t mean it is dead, but just that one of the core parts of its legitimacy has disappeared. This is what Brexit and the Trump victory represent, and also the strengthening of many radical-right movements in Europe, such as the Front National. As Jordan Greenhall has so brilliantly analyzed in his article on the Trump Insurgency, it represents a war against on the one hand the Deep State and the Old Media that undergirded the neoliberal order, but also against what he called the Blue Church, those that created the counter-culture that balanced out this order with new rights and equalities.

This is of course a ‘reactionary’ model, a hope to get back to a past of strong nation-states, which we believe is destined to fail over the longer run, while it also releases the social forces of hate and ingroup vs outgroup conflicts on a global scale. This is empathically not, a commons-centric reaction, though it uses decentralized media to overturn the old order. On the contrary, we see that core groups of the population are actually hankering for a return to strong leaders and more fixed hierarchies. The paradox is of course that this negative trend creates also strong counter-reactions, and in this particular sense, Steve Bosserman’s description may in fact be correct. More people have woken up to the necessity that change is not a luxury, but a necessity. This is what I heard from many U.S. commoners for example, first after November 8 election results, they retreat for a few days in the corners of their rooms in a fetal position, but after two of three weeks, they were re-energized, and for example, Stephanie Rearick of the Mutual Aid Networks of Madison, has reported a extraordinary resurgence of interest in her network and commons-oriented activities. Expect 2017 to be a great year of commons practice.

If you read only one article about how the Trump victory is related to peer to peer dynamics, read this article on how it was achieved, through very precise Big Data-based micro-marketing strategies, by the infamous firm Cambridge Analytica. This is the dark side of analyzing peer to peer activity on the networks, the capacity to tailor messages to the individual level. The forces for hierarchy has now been successfully mobilized, how will the forces of equipotentiality respond? This is the grand geo-political challenge of the p2p and commons movement for the next decade. As Jordan Greenhall puts it, this is the challenge to the ‘children of the Blue Church’.

The question as I would put it is: how can the new p2p/commons forces, that are pioneering new models of collective intelligence and power, ally with the broad forces of resistance against the new Hierarchism? This is not just a ‘ideological’ fight, but a fight that requires real answers to social and physical needs. One of our intuitions is that relocalized production, that can put back to work millions of blue collar works in the urban and bioregional economy, is a huge part of that answer.

Trend 2: The struggle for the appropriate scale of a new world order: Localization, Global Nomadic Structures, and the Subsidiarity of Material Production

What Bosserman describes in particular in his arguments for 2016 being a pivot year, is the loss of faith in bigger centralized structures, such as the nation-state, and a huge return to the necessity and feeling of localization. And we can see it everywhere. In 2016, a study on the Flanders by the Green think thank Oikos, confirmed the results of an earlier study by Tine de Moor in her booklet Homo Cooperans: there has been a tenfold increase in local civic initiatives over the last ten years, and many of those involve the creation of commons-based shared resources at the local level. So yes, there is indeed a demonstrated exponential rise of urban commons initiatives. With Christian Iaione, Sheila Foster and their colleagues of LabGov, and with Vasilis Niaros of the P2P Lab, we have undertaken a analysis of 40 urban commons case studies (half of them from the Global South), which confirms the present sophistication not just of the project individually, but of public urban policies that support them.

At the same time though, the internet continues to exert itself as a technology for global neo-nomadic structures. In our list from last year, we mentioned the huge underground neo-nomadic economy of the transmigrants described in the seminal book by Alain Tarius (Etrangers de Passage) on the ‘poor to poor, peer to peer’ infrastructures. This year, we witnessed the international expansion of the kind of peer to peer entrepreneurial coalitions we are following, such as the Enspiral collective, which is breaking out of its New Zealand shell to become a global network. On the geeky side, infrastructures such as the Embassy Networks, ImpactHub and other franchises are continuing their development apace, creating ‘circular territories’ or territories of circulation that are not confined to borders and nation-states. Our own report, Value in the Commons Economy, co-written with Vasilis Niaros, highlights three case studies of how such global entre-donneurial (i.e. generative towards the commons, rather than extractive) coalitions are developing complex contributory accounting systems. The P2P Value study, which studied 300 peer production communities over 3 years, with the P2P Foundation as member of that consortium, unearthed significant findings under-writing our theses on these global governance mechanisms. For example, in Adam Arvidsson’s (et al.) concluding essay on the findings, he found that a majority of 78% of these communities are practicing, preparing and/or looking into open value or contributory accounting systems; again, this is significant since changes in accounting practices and philosophies have accompanied the great value regime transitions in the past. Just as important are the findings on the new post-national ideologies being born in such communities: these communities are also ‘imaginary communities’ with specific values — they want to make the world a better place — i.e. they are ethical communities not just profit-maximising entities, and their identification is with their global networks, not just the locales they are embedded in. This is historically important since it echoes the birth of nation-states as imaginary communities (see Benedict Anderson’s landmark book on this topic). As one neo-tribal advocate [1] writes: “Neotribes aspire to be both grounded in the local and connected to the global.”

The issue that is raised here is how to compose the contradictory yearnings for localization, with the emergence of global trans-national structures, practices and mentalities that are occurring at the same time. At the P2P Foundation, we believe there is a logic which ‘transcends and includes’ the advantages and necessities of both localization and trans-nationalization: what we call Cosmo-Localization as a organizational principle for the organization of society at all levels (what’s light is shared globally, what’s heavy is organized and produced locally). Applied to industrial and material production, our friends at the P2P Lab call this methodology: DGML (‘Design Global, Manufacture Local’) and a prime expression of this are the plans of the Fab City coalition (of which we are now a part as well), which works around the Barcelona Pledge, to re-localize the production of products, services and food by a factor of 50% by 2054, and which now coalesces 16 cities. One of the main expressions. and drivers of such trans-nationalization may well be international coalitions of cities such as this one. The Spanish municipal coalitions do in fact have a internationalist agenda as much as a local one, and are striving for a alliance of Rebel Cities. In the last few weeks, thinking through the tension between localization and trans-nationalization, I have come up with the concept of ‘the subsidiarity of material production’, which marries both imperatives, and can be clearly distinguished from both nation-state protectionism, neoliberal globalization, but also simple reactive localism.

Trend 3: The P2P Infrastructural Revolution continues: 2017 will be the year of pilots

2016 was certainly a pivot year for distributed energy developments. In 60 countries solar is already cheaper than fossil fuels, after it became cheaper than wind energy earlier last year.

It is easy to become blase about this, but we are reaching the point were nearly 40% of the world population is connected to the digital network and hence, is able to engage in peer to peer dynamics and conditional on certain capabilities, to co-create commons-based and cooperative networks. The anti-pipeline mobilization at Standing Rock is a good example of this, since it shows the interconnectedness not just of a multitude of indigeneous groups, but of their global supporters everywhere on the globe. As our correspondent Ivor Stodolky writes: “the whole protest is about defending a commons. It’s the water, the land, and the ancestral burial grounds of a community which has held and protected them as a commons for thousands of years.” Also, according to monetary reformer Bernard Lietaer, there are now more than 13,000 locally organized currencies in the world!

One of our favourite exemplary groups is still l’Atelier Paysan, the open agricultural machining community in France, has a very principled approach to Technological Sovereignty, which is linked to our own concept of Value Sovereignty, which we have described in our report on Value mentioned in section 1. L’Atelier Paysan is part of a coalition of ecological farmers, INPACT, which represents 10% of the farming community in France, the only one that is growing while their agribusiness-depending colleagues are in very dire straits. This is an important counterforce to the wave of technological determinism that has swept both right and left forces around the theme of automation, which is seen erroneously as a fatality which can only go one way. Hence, see also our series about True Accelerationism which is our answer to the book, Inventing the Future, which is in our view a uncritical appeal to automation. Not that anyone should be opposed to ‘automation’ per se, but it is important to choose the kinds of technology and automation which serves human needs, and not the needs of capital, and this is indeed, what the concept and practice of technological sovereignty is about. Several interventions in the Platform Coooperativism conference of 2016 also stressed it. The brisk growth of platform coops is one of the big stories of 2016, with nearly 300 of them catalogued in the Internet of Ownership directory. We really urge you to watch some of the video presentations of thePlatform Cooperativism 2016 conference, which show many great examples, including platform coops that are organized by nursing and cleaning workers, and financed by their unions. The big story is also that at least in Western Europe, the big cooperative federations [2] [3] are now on board, and that they are all discussing, and planning, for a convergence between cooperative and commons-centric models. Just as radical is the big announced turnaround of the Agence Francaise du Development, which held a congress last december, dedicated to the central role of the commons model in development. This is an engagement for billions of euros of investment in the commons model, under dedicated commons-friendly leadership.

According to Baruch Gottlieb of the Telekommunisten Group and their ‘Anti-Disintermediation’ group, p2p internet infrastructures are also continuing to grow. He wrote: “It was a great year for developments in end-to-end web applications, with projects like Patchwork, Git-SSB, datproject/beaker, webtorrent/instant.io emerging a very usable scalable p2p alternatives to proprietary communications platforms… p2p distributed systems beyond blockchains. it was also a good year for meshnets, alternets, community networks which work outside, or beside the Internet, based on Freifunk… they have developed robust solar panel-powered freifunk nodes which will generate alternative free communicative communities on or off the Internet.”

The Blockchain was of course also a recurring story in 2016, but just as with the basic income, it was a preparation for 2017, as the year of the pilots. Here is a map of Basic Income pilots as well as a description of the coming experiment in Finland. Caution is on the order of the day, though we favour the basic income as a transitional measure that allows more citizens to engage in commons production, the devil is in the details and a lot of the experiments are not basic income experiments at all, but schemes for unemployed workers, as is the case in Finland, Nijmegen and other places.

Photo by EpcotLegacy

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A revived and mainstreamable left should offer large numbers of people productive roles in an economy that can actually build the alternative energy technologies, decentered electric grids, urban food-production systems and well-maintained housing and collective infrastructures that are needed to face the ravages of environmental decay and climate change.

We need a commons-centric, peer production based, ‘design global, manufacture local’ approach to create a massive programs of productive work for disintegrating communities, with jobs that are compatible with the need for a social-ecological transition.

I am very happy to see the same sentiments and idea expressed by Brian Holmes, in this following excerpt from the Networked Labour mailing list (with minor modifications):

“The US now has to cope with the cultural consequences of deindustrialization. Those consequences are alienation from the sense of self-worth that is generated by freely exercising one’s own productive capacities. Alienation gives rise to resentment: the keyword of today’s proto-fascist politics. Ignoring the problem of increasingly disenfranchised non-professional workers will not make it go away.

The last thing to do is to pander to a racist and chauvinist cultural complex. Instead the urgency is to create a political economy that does not foster proto-fascist resentment.

The key point is collective investment. This doesn’t have to mean laptop computers with word processors and graph functions, which are the hallmark of what the Ehrenreichs long ago called “the professional-managerial class.” Nor, however, does it mean taking contemporary Germany’s path, because despite all the solar power and local industry, Germany depends in reality on so-called free trade, which is predatory on other economies. But what this “new economy” could mean is the new tool-kit of numerically controlled production machines, or CNC tools, which are open to the peer production that Michel Bauwens talks about. I’m talking about digitally controlled routers, lathes, bandsaws and so on, not only additive 3-D printing. The advantage of these relatively inexpensive machine tools is that they allow small groups of workers to autonomously carry out sophisticated projects, fulfilling the cultural demand for dignity of labor without oppressive management by suits. If people learn to use them in a local capitalist factory producing quality goods for decent wages, then during periods of unemployment or early retirement they could also use them in a commons-based economy, to help rebuild a resilient community. In this way the value of one’s own labor would be reinforced along a pathway that leads outside of current managerial capitalism.

Such an approach could be applied in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods as well as white ones. In fact, I got the idea of “community production” from a Black social entrepreneur in Detroit named Blair Evans. It’s crucial to remember that Black communities were the first to be hit with deindustrialization in the Northern US cities, to absolutely devastating economic and social consequences that can never be repaired by welfare, nor even less by policing and imprisonment. In Chicago where I live, the gun violence in the impoverished neighborhoods is staggering, and what does society do? Half of us (myself included) protest against police atrocities, and the other half calls (successfully I’m afraid) for yet more police. Meanwhile the schools are dismantled, the health services are closed, the murder rate hits new records every year and absolutely nothing is done to promote employment, personal and familial autonomy, or any kind of community resilience whatsoever.

Managerial capitalism created financial governance, global supply chains and the China-centric economy of low-priced and badly made commodities. It promoted naked greed, hyperconsumption and mesmerizing spectacle for its university-educated cadres, while destroying much of the hands-on productive education offered by factory labor and the trades. It disenfranchised the former industrial working classes of all races, and among whites it fostered a politics of resentment that is now wide open to full-blown racist fascism. The situation cannot be changed by simply wishing that all these disenfranchised people will suddenly switch to a counter-cultural sharing-economy lifestyle, or by expecting them to endorse an eco-socialist program with no immediately tangible benefits. Nor even less can it be changed as the US Democratic party attempts, by symbolically exalting minority populations in order to get out the votes for the very same policies that impose precarity, unemployment and racialized exclusion. Instead a revived and mainstreamable left should offer large numbers of people productive roles in an economy that can actually build the alternative energy technologies, decentered electric grids, urban food-production systems and well-maintained housing and collective infrastructures that are needed to face the ravages of environmental decay and climate change. Rather than doing this according to an ideological prescription, the yet-to-be-created new mainstream left should create economic opportunities that will allow people to fulfill their desires for autonomy and a sense of self-worth. In my view, that’s the pathway of radically egalitarian social democracy in the twenty-first century.”

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