The post OPEN 2019 Community Gathering – Decentralised Collaboration appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>When: Thursday, 27 June – Friday, 28 June
9:00 am – 8:00 pm
Where: University of London, Malet Street, London
In previous years, we’ve promoted platform co-ops in a traditional conference format. This year we’re doing things differently and will be exploring opportunities to increase decentralised collaboration in a completely open space format. We’re proud to be working on collaboration with Phoebe Tickell and Nati Lombardo from Enspiral, to convene and facilitate the event.
Who is OPEN 2019 for?
OPEN 2019 is an inter-network event for community builders, network organisers and key connecting members of organisations from a wide range of progressive communities. We welcome all cooperators, rebels, mavens, network builders, systems architects, open source developers, and anyone else who is interested in designing and building our collective future. The idea is to network the networks by creating deeper connections and relationships between some of the key connectors from a wide range of mutually aligned communities.
What will we be doing?
To kick off each day attendees will be introduced to a handful of new, distributed, cooperative, technical and social projects, through a selection of lightning talks. After that attendees will be guided to co-design the event by proposing, refining and voting on the content for the rest of the two days’ sessions. Experienced facilitators from the Enspiral network will help us create a ‘container’ for our time together. Working in small groups we will discuss, debate and feedback ideas to the wider group, to ensure everyone has a chance to have their say and that the collective wisdom of the group is captured and shared.
With an informal evening dinner and drinks and more networking opportunities, there will be plenty of time for building deeper understanding and relationships too.
What will you get out of it?
Recognising that effective collaboration, at any scale, can be hard to define and even harder to achieve OPEN 2019 does not aim to build immediate collaboration between attendees. Having studied the key ingredients of collaboration we know that the first step towards effective collaboration is building deeper connections and trusted relationships, and that is what OPEN 2019 aims to deliver.
By introducing more connectors to each other, getting to know one another, and working together over two days we aim to strengthen our relationships, deepen our understanding and to cross-pollinate and fertilise the pre-existing projects and evolving ideas within our networks.
We will explore opportunities to coordinate our existing organisations better, to keep each other better informed about what we are working on and to potentially cooperate if we can find opportunities to do so. Ultimately, as a result of the networking, we aim to pave the way for any collaborative opportunities which might arise as things evolve…
When and where is it?
The OPEN 2019 Community Gathering will take place on the 27th and 28th of June at the University of London in Holborn, London.
What should I do if I want to come?
Spaces are limited to 150 attendees in order to keep the group small enough to be effective so, if are interested in being involved, please order your tickets below asap. If this event becomes over-subscribed we will explore the possibility of running additional events. If you have a project you would like to present at a lightning talk we’d love to hear from you (please email a short description of your project) but please note – all attendees, including presenters, will be required to buy a ticket.
Please join us to discuss, explore, connect and decide how we can deliver systemic change, together.
For more information and tickets click here!
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]]>The post The Making of the Cooperative Cloud appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>A cooperative cloud would also provide a clear stepping stone towards the open source, collaborative working environment we have described as PLANET and could help form the basis of an entire open source suite of apps for the cooperative economy.
This Internet of Ownership ‘Clouds directory‘ explores and documents efforts to form free, open source alternatives to corporate cloud infrastructures, especially through cooperative business models and is a very useful resource for anyone thinking about building something similar.
As ever, at The Open Co-op we are keen to encourage as much cooperation and collaboration in this area as possible because it seems crazy for new initiatives to re-invent the wheel and greater gains, and network effects, will be easier to achieve if more effort is focused on one larger collaborative effort than many disparate initiatives.
The post below is the latest update from the CommonsCloud project from the Free Knowledge Institute which helpfully details a lot of their technical decisions and subsequent setup.
Members of the CommonsCloud project will be speaking at OPEN 2018 in London in July – come along and say “Hi” if you are interested in collaborating on a common solution.
How did we get here and where are we heading
CommonsCloud is an online collaborative platform, an alternative to proprietary software platforms like Google Drive, but respectful with privacy and it doesn’t commercialise your data. The ambition of the CommonsCloud project is to offer an alternative to proprietary cloud platforms, under the control of its users, replicable as free software and well documented. This is collaborative web applications to edit, store and share documents, agendas, manage projects and facilitate debate and decision-making. The way we do this is through an alliance of collectives committed to free software and digital sovereignty, building on the best web applications that are already out there and bring them together in a user-friendly environment where people help each other, enhance their awareness regarding the power of self-governance and sovereignty.
Collectives and individual users have a say in the decision-making of the CommonsCloud, through the cooperative femProcomuns. Users become co-owners of the CommonsCloud as cooperativists, paying a monthly contribution for the services needed. Users that want to try the service or contribute in other users projects, can access a free account with the basic services. Everyone can choose their contribution according to capacity and needs.
We’ve recently started a crowdfunding campaign at the Goteo platform, many people are asking how did we start to develop this project. Let’s take a dive into where we come from, which free software building blocks we have chosen so far and how they come together. Then we share some ideas for the near future.
Brief history and inspirations
We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, or our ambition would have little chances to become real. We can say that all collectives participating in the CommonsCloud Alliance have their own experiences self-hosting their free software web applications, from wikimedia instances to taiga, RedMine or WeKan boards for kanban/agile self-management of projects. From ownclouds to NextClouds and from Asterisk (VoIP) to Etherpad or RocketChat servers. The thing with all these webapps is that if we manage them individually, our users typically need to register many different accounts and collaboration between collectives is rather limited. And there are so many web applications that keeping up to date on all of them is a job on its own, not something that one can do alone. So there’s a need to build this together, especially as the tools and networks of the corporate masters are very powerful and it isn’t easy to seduce people away from them.
There are some platforms that make the management of free software web applications very straightforward and with reduced maintenance effort. Let’s take a loot at the ones we have worked with.
Since September 2016 we have been running a self-hosted server with Sandstorm. The Free Knowledge Institute still runs the instance and we have tried it with a few dozen people and projects. It allows one-click deployment of over 40 apps and encrypts the data of the users in a personally controlled “grain” as they call it. After some time we found however that it isn’t especially easy to find back your information inside the dfferent apps, in particular if you are involved in different projects. Also the users need to get used to so many different user interfaces, one for each app – even though these are embedded into one persistent interface of the Sandstorm platform. A very interesting project, but it wasn’t exactly what we wanted.
Then we studied Cloudron and set up a few instances, spoke with the founders, ran a dozen of the applications. On this platform there’s again a one-click installation procedure, that in this case installs each app in a docker container, that requires very little maintenance effort. The offer of the Cloudron founders is a 8€/month subscription fee to get maintenance updates for self-hosted instances, very decent really. Maybe this was getting nearer to what we wanted, but we felt we lacked control over the applications. Maybe this solution is designed for collectives without sysadmins…
Then a very inspiring case is the Framasoft project in France, which has put up different webservices for many of the usual applications which its users can access with one account. From spreadsheets, to videoconferencing, to notepads, to framadate (alternative to Doodle), from calendars to mindmaps, etc. One interesting feature is that their sustainability model is based primarily on donations (some 300.000 euro/year), an alliance of collectives that contribute to the development, maintenance and usage and a team of 7 people with a salary to maintain the core operation, plus 35 members and some 300.000 users. Some differences with the CommonsCloud though. After several co-creation workshops we have decided to reduce the number of userinterfaces. Instead of several dozens we are starting with three core platforms that we intent to integrate where possible, but that each one of them provides a wide range of features. One other is that we set this in motion as a platform cooperative, where the users become the owners. We love Framasoft’s “De-googlify-Internet” campaign!
So how did we start the CommonsCloud? The first meeting we had was in January 2017: we got together with 10 people from different collectives in Barcelona to lay the foundations. We have put in common the experiences as briefly reviewed above. Other interesting cloud applications that we should mention include Cloudy that our friends at Guifi.net and the UPC are developing as a GNU/Linux based cloud infrastructure and Cozy as a personal cloud solution. FKI Board member Marco Fioretti has been working over the last five years on an architecture proposal for a personal cloud or “PERcloud” that each user can have individually on his/her own machine. This vision has influenced the design decisions of the CommonsCloud architecture, even though our current architecture is focused on collective cloud solutions that are co-owned by the users. After a co-creation session at the Mobile Social Congress in Barcelona in 2017 we set up an international working group, on the FKI wiki and the CommonsCloud mailing list. From there, the work has continued on- and offline, in parallel with the set up of the femProcomuns cooperative, until now, when both are ready to take the next step: enter the production phase.
The core software architecture
Keep it simple and hide the complexity.
One account for single sign-on
The first thing all mentioned platforms have in common is one account server that allows users to login at all different services (single sign-on). LDAP – the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol – is the open standard to organise directories of user accounts, and most webapps have existing plugins to facilitate user accounts managed through an LDAP server.
We designed the LDAP Directory Information Tree in such a way to accomodate for other collectives to join the alliance and share the LDAP account server (we consider it a mutualised account server). Each user can be part of multiple groups (Organisational Units, OU) and each OU can have multiple services and ACL groups. We all know how important user onboarding is. Given the increasing challenge to keep spam under control, we bring human validation of accounts back into the game. Remember your wiki getting full of SPAM and closing automatic user registrations? We have seen it in different contexts. Instead we designed an onboarding process that goes as follows:
- people register and indicate a primary collective, and validate their email address
- the admins of the primary collective validate the user and activate the account
- the user sets her/his password and s/he is up and running on the services that are available for everyone (public services) plus the ones from the primary collective.
From here on, the user can manage his/her profile and request or be invited to become part of other collectives and access the corresponding services. Our man Chris has been developing the webinterface that facilitates this process. Still much UI work is to be done to make the experience better.
Phabricator – as the community PROJECTS self-management platform
Based on user demand we prioritised three main areas of applications with a “winner” in each area that we considered as the most solid and strategic choice for that area.
Phabricator is a platform to manage projects, that allows open/closed, volunteer/professional teams and communities to organise their work with agile methodologies and Kanban workboards (like Trello, Wekan, Kanboard) with a few dozens of complementary applications that one can integrate easily within a group if so desired. It also ofers a locker to store passwords and other secrets, a hierarchical wiki and a documentation engine, a survey tool, notepad, badges, blogs, etc Members of the Barcelona: Free Software association (part of the alliance) shared the experience of the global KDE community who uses Phabricator to manage software development with its code repository toolset; the Wikipedia community also runs its own Phabricator instance. As you can appreciate, Phabricator is not just for code development (like github) but provides an extensive toolset for non-technical teams to self-manage their community production work.
NextCloud as the core online OFFICE platform
NextCloud is the community fork of ownCloud and many consider it the best of online cloud platforms, where one can store and share files, calendars, and contacts. With the appropriate plugins, online editing of office documents can be integrated. This we consider the killerapp that our users need to migrate from Google’s Drive. There are several options here to edit online documents. At this moment we have integrated the CollaboraOffice online LibreOffice server for that purpose. There are also other options, such as Only Office, that can do that job. We are collectively exploring what’s the best solution on this front. We know for sure that many of our users need to collaboratively edit online office documents, or Google Drive will remain their “friend”.
NextCloud has recently incorporated the so called “Circles”, which allow users to define and self-manage usergroups whith whom they can quickly share documents. At the same time we are exploring the Groups option that we manage through the LDAP directory, where users of a certain collective can automatically have access to the collective’s file share, calendar and group contacts.
While it is true that NextCloud has lots of other apps that can be added through plugins, right now we haven’t activated them. We first want to have the pioneering userbase to get used to the three core platforms and then sit together to see which features and apps we think are best to have and in what ways.
One of the most wonderful things of NextCloud is its synchronisation of files, calendars and contacts between the server and one’s mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop. When editing a document online, one may decide to continue through one’s local LibreOffice installation, synch the files automatically and continue on any of the synched devices, automatically the whole team has access to the latest version of any shared document, without additional human intervention.
Discourse as the AGORA, the platform for online debate and collective decisionmaking
Online discussion needs a good platform to convince people with so many different experiences. Some are fans of online forums, others of mailing lists. Discourse combines them both into a flexible and userfriendly environment. We found it a very decent complement to the other core platforms.
Some aspects of the User Experience
The first thing we already mentioned was the decision to limit the number of user interfaces, of different platforms. Right now we have three: Phabricator, NextCloud and Discourse, plus the web interface for the onboarding process to register and manage users in the LDAP directory server. We will try to choose new applications within these existing platforms, but there will for sure be some more platforms that we will add in the near future. For example the OdooCoop economic self-management platform for the social and solidarity economy that we are developing with another alliance around the femProcomuns coop. And possibly other, depending on the demand of the users and the proposals of the developers.
A second aspect is the onboarding process itself. Based on previous experience, the fully automatic user validation isn’t our preferred route, due to the risks for SPAM. On the other hand a fully centralised human validation process could slow down the onboarding of new people. Instead we choose a path in between, where new users choose a “primary collective” where they belong to, and the admins of this collective get then notified and can validate the new user accounts.
A third aspect is the combination with public CommonsCloud services, such as the three mentioned services explained here, and private instances for collectives participating in the CommonsCloud. A user can have access to the public NextCloud instance but also to the private one of his collective. The user interface will need to combine these options neatly into a humanly understandable and easy to user interface.
Modes of production
The way we produce the services as explained here is as much as possible building on the motivation of the shared mission. We can distinguish three levels of engagement:
- Driving team, of developers, sysadmins, designers, communicators etc: they take the initiative to make it happen, and are the first ones to get paid when income is generated; income is distributed depending on real work done;
- Alliance members: they share knowledge on the R&D level, participate in the strategic decisions and want this initiative to exist;
- End users: they are aware of the need to build the alternatives to corporate clouds collectively as a commons and contribute according their needs and capacities to make this happen. End users can be either individuals and collectives who want a dedicated instance of some or all of the services offered. In a next post we will share the governance model that we are developing to guide and organise our work.
Many details need still to be defined, but we are working along these lines to take the leap. Join us and contribute to the CommonsCloud.
Originally published on open.coop
Photo by neXtplanaut 
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]]>Phil Carey: We live in a world that needs to accommodate an extra 3 billion people within 50 years. We also have a population that is ageing globally, and here in the U.K., the number of people aged 65+ is projected to rise by nearly 50% (48.7%) in the next 17 years to over 16 million.
These two factors means that there will not be the manpower or financial resources to cope with this demographic shift unless we start to do something about it now.
The purpose of the session was to highlight the facts, issues and opportunities that an ageing population poses and to offer a ‘call to action’ as to why all generations need to start to work collaboratively in order to build a sustainable ‘ageless’ future.
The session started with the image above, to reinforce the message that we need to establish the vision, the passengers and the journey before we start to go into the details of platforms and collaboration. We explored the definitions of perspectives and values within the different generations and the hash facts and implications of the ‘age tsunami’ on the UK and the rest of the world.
Some of these can be seen on the session’s slides.
The session was then opened up to get feedback on what the group heard saw and felt, and to get the group’s view on what areas they felt were potential subjects to begin this collaboration process. Two categories did emerge – they were a future vision for an ‘ageless housing solution’, and creating a collaborative ageless asset image.
There was not enough time to discuss ‘platforms’, but the issue of how to prevent the digital divide becoming an issue between the different generations did get raised several times.
A animated video was subsequently produced to help summarise the session, and to reinforce the call to action.
About Philip Carey -Views and Shoes ltd.
Philip is conducting personal projects that focus on seeing the world from another perspective. They all focus on finding new ways of communicating complexity and difference visually and simply in order to improve communication and to define a common vision.
He has a personal interest in the looking at new ways of living in an ageing society, and the desire to make it sustainable by the time he gets there – but realises that not enough is being done to make this a reality.
He is currently looking at new ways to communicate London visually see www.londonruns.com.
Photo by Spyros Papaspyropoulos
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]]>The post Thoughts from Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism 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
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]]>The post Reciproka: Facilitating Open Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.
]]>“Reciproka facilitates the development of a co-owned network of open co-operatives through ownership transfer, network building and co-operative accumulation.”
David Bollier and I (see David’s post from yesterday) had the pleasure of meeting Janosch Sbeih and Jérôme Birolini (“The Reciprokans”) at the Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism conference in London. We were very impressed with their overall concept and presentation, it aggregates and puts a fresh spin on some of the proposals we have been discussing over the last few years regarding open cooperativism and mutalization. It also draws from Telekomunnisten’s idea of the Venture Commune for “commonifying” productive assets. The model needs refinement, careful development and feedback so it can mature into an actionable proposition, but we fully support it and are eager to see how it progresses. Here is their brief introduction to the project:
Reciproka: All over the world, inequalities are reaching alarming levels. The structural reproduction of economic inequality lies in the unequal ownership of productive assets as it maintains a distributive mechanism in which owners accumulate ever more wealth while the majority of salaried workers remain in precarious positions of dependence. At the same time, the current growth-dependent, extractive economic model is bringing us to the brink of socio-ecological collapse.
By facilitating the transfer of ownership from privately owned corporations to their employees, we can provide an opportunity for employees to accumulate more wealth through their newly acquired ownership (hence reducing inequalities) and provide greater opportunities for workers to participate in decision-making process (hence allowing for a more democratic culture). Simultaneously, local owners gain access to a mechanism to “cash out” when they want to retire, while resting assured that that their enterprises remain active and anchored in their local community, managed by the very people who have built it up over their lifetimes. Since this transition of ownership already involves an organisational restructuring, why not simultaneously rethink the organisation’s business model to make it work not only for the people who create the wealth, but also for the planet from which all wealth ultimately originates?!
A timely opportunity
The coming retirement of millions of baby boom entrepreneurs around the world represents an enormous opportunity to grow worker ownership. In the US alone, an estimate states that 671,000 middle market businesses (worth an estimated US$ 2.47 trillion) will have to be sold, closed, or otherwise disposed of between 2011 and 2029, by baby boomers[1]. This generational transfer ahead can prove to be a once in a lifetime historic opportunity to catalyse a transition towards a sustainable and community-empowering economy by providing mechanisms to transform these private enterprises into sustainable open co-operatives. The conversion of these businesses into democratic ownership models would mean a tremendous reduction of inequality and the dawn of a new co-operative and democratic era.
To achieve scale, new forms of co-operative lending coupled with technical and process support are necessary. While several organisations are already working to provide that type of service, we believe that a more systematic approach is required if we are to create an ethical and federated counter-economy able to perpetuate itself on its own.
Isolated transfers of ownerships are not enough
Unless co-operatives can be federated as a unified, ethical, entrepreneurial coalition organised around the shared goal of sustaining the commons and the commoners, we believe that isolated transfers of ownership will not be enough for the open co-operative movement to gain sufficient traction to become autonomous, therefore leaving the issue of livelihoods and social reproduction unresolved and the movement dependent on the capitalist economy (i.e. fragmented, exposed to exploitation and overall highly precarious).
In a similar vein, isolated transfers of ownership do not guarantee nor encourage the weaving of links among newly-formed open co-operatives, leaving essential features to accomplish a comprehensive economic transition – such as co-operation and solidarity – outside of their strategic scheme.
Reciproka
Inspired by Mondragon’s internal capital account (ICA) and Dmytri Kleiner`s concept of “commons-based venture funding[2]”, Reciproka holds in its core an innovative co-operative accumulation mechanism which allows for the self-propelling build-up of an ethical counter-economy while gradually providing each of its members with increasing cash transfers, representing a new kind of basic income.
Instead of assisting working people to acquire their enterprise (as most financial services organisations that invest in worker- and community-owned operations currently do), Reciproka acquires the SMEs in transition for a commons (i.e. a trusteeship legal structure) in which both consumers (i.e. citizens) and producers (i.e. co-operative workers) become members.
In addition to assuming 100% of the financial risks linked to the operation, Reciproka assists traditional privately-owned enterprise in their organisational conversion to open co-operatives, while leaving managerial autonomy to the workers. A network of experts and mentors provide the technical and process support necessary to assist with the organisational transition both from a legal, social and sustainability point of view. The enterprises in transition gain thus access to the necessary facilitation, education and mentoring resources to ensure that their newly formed co-operatives are well equipped with the governance and business models that suit their particular needs and desires.
Reciproka will look to ensure the viability of each project as well as its commitment to a low-carbon future where the well-being of people and planet are primary. Reciproka has thus written into its DNA to effectively address the core challenge of our time: the transition to an equitable society that meets everyone’s needs while living within the limits of one earth.
The result is an integrated network of mutually co-owned open-co-operatives working towards that goal, where each co-operative is at the same time autonomous while being co-owned by all other members of the Reciproka common.
This type of structure offers several benefits:
- The system gives citizens the opportunity as well as financial and social incentives to play an active part in the transition to a co-operative, ethical and sustainable economy (see www.reciproka.cc for further information on the incentives and benefits for the various stakeholders).
- The mutual ownership structure aligns the interests of the newly formed co-operatives to collaborate with each other for their own interests and the greater good of the overall coalition.
- By holding the assets in a trusteeship legal structure, Reciproka protects the ethical entrepreneurial coalition from external investors, as its assets can never be sold out.
Last but not least, Reciproka also contemplates the creation of a co-operative incubation centre for the development of new products and services and the integral support of young open co-operative entrepreneurs.
We are currently in the early stages of designing Reciproka and building up alliances for collaboration once we start operating. If you are an experienced facilitator of co-operative ownership transfer, organisational transition, interested in funding Reciproka and/or want to discuss further possibilities to collaborate, please contact us at [email protected] and [email protected].
Notes:
[1] Dennis Roberts, “Middle market investment banking offers opportunity for trained valuators, accountants,” Accounting Web, May 10, 2010, http://www.accountingweb.com/aa/auditing/middle-market-investment-banking-offers-opportunity-for-trained-valuators-accountants
[2] A system in which co-operatives needing capital for machinery, post a bond, and the other co-ops in the system would fund the bond, and buy the machine for a commons in which both funders and users would be members. The interest paid on these loans create a fund that would gradually be able to pay an increasing income to their members, constituting a new kind of basic income.
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]]>
The basic point of the conference was to:
“imagine a transparent, democratic and decentralised economy which works for everyone. A society in which anyone can become a co-owner of the organisations on which they, their family & their community depend. A world where everyone can participate in all the decisions that affect them.
“This is not a utopian ideal, it is the natural outcome of a networked society made up of platform cooperatives; online organisations owned and managed by their members. By providing a viable alternative to the standard internet business model based on monopoly and extraction, platform cooperatives provide a template for a new type of organisation – forming the building blocks for a new economy.”
The idea of “platform co-operatives” – launched at a seminal New York City conference in November 2015 co-organized by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider – has quickly found a following internationally. People have begun to realize how Uber, Airbnb, Taskrabbit and countless other network platforms are distressingly predatory, using venture capital money and algorithms to override health, safety and labor standards and municipal governance itself.
The London event showed the breadth and depth of interest in this topic – and in the vision of creating a new type of global economy. There were folks like Felix Weth, founder of Fairmondo, a German online marketplace and web-based co-op owned by its users; Brianna Werttlaufer, cofounder and CEO of Stocksy United, an artist-owned, multistakeholder cooperative in Victoria, British Colombia; and co-operative finance and currency expert Pat Conaty.
Trebor Scholz’s opening keynote
There was a lot of talk about building new infrastructures that could mutualize the benefits from local businesses while connecting to a larger global network of co-ops sharing the same values. Among the tools mentioned for achieving this goal: Mondragon-style co-ops, government procurement policies to favor local co-ops, shifting deposits to local credit unions, and crowdfunding citizen-led community development projects.
One of the more impressive works-in-progress that I encountered is called Reciproka, which proposes a legal, financial and governance structure for federating a network of co-ops, each of which would mutually own portions of the others through a jointly owned trust. The idea is to build a “counter-economy that is able to perpetuate itself on its own,” explained Janosch Sbeih.
To help achieve this goal, Sbeih and his partner Jérôme Birolini proposed a scheme by which aging baby boomer entrepreneurs could retire by converting their conventional businesses into employee-owned coops rooted in local communities. Participating co-ops would band together and contribute to a common fund. The federation would work to build a larger, diversified network of like-minded co-ops while building a pool of shared funds. All co-op members would act as voting trustees in a overarching legal structure that would eventually become the sole owner of the co-operatives. There are some refinements that need to be made to the Reciproka plan, but it gives you an idea of the bold thinking at the conference.
There were other fascinating discussions, such as a panel on “Future Makerspaces in Redistributed Manufacturing.” The focus here was on open design and manufacturing as the core infrastructure for building a new type of circular economy. Instead of the “extraction – use – disposal” sequence for economic activity, the goal would be to institute cycles and spirals that minimize waste and focus on local needs. While the future business models for open manufacturing remain somewhat speculative, one idea put forward was a business that would help individuals build their own stuff at reasonable prices – in conjunction with FabLabs, for example.
Proponents of new forms of distributed manufacturing consider it a Fourth Industrial Revolution (the first ones being agriculture; the steam engine; and electronics). Emerging trends point to a production system that will be distributed, not centralized; digital, not mechanical and electrical; oriented to direct, on-demand production; using mixed forms of intellectual property; and based on open source principles that are accessible to anyone.
There were other fascinating panels – on alternative currencies, collaborative decisionmaking, trust and reputation systems, open data, “bread funds” for the self-employed, and much else. I participated on a panel introducing the commons and exploring the role of open co-ops (as explained by Stacco Troncoso of the P2P Foundation) and the blending of co-operatives and commons (as described by Nicole Alix of La Coop des Communes).
There is clearly a lot of creative development still needed to actualize the ideas presented at Open Co-op. But a big barrier, especially among traditional co-ops and trade unions, may be the skepticism or ignorance about these fresh ideas. It can be hard to embrace the unfamiliar. Fortunately, the Open Co-op conference helped expand people’s imaginations, provide hard evidence of working models, and encourage new experiments. May this conference become an annual affair!
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