When: Wednesday, 3 April
4:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Add to: iCal – gCal

(See OPEN COOP website for map and further detail)

Could we model a formula for organisational collaboration on three simple rules?

1. Cohesion
2. Seperation
3. Alignment

…and define a protocol to aggregate, visualise and disseminate the resultant murmurations?

This free webinar on “Catalysing collaboration at scale” is the first even of OPEN 2019 organised by The Open Co-op exploring ideas around The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns.

We have convened a panel of community builders, technologists and collaborators to explore ideas which might help all the people, communities and organisations working on creating a new, decentralised, regenerative economy collaborate better to produce more impact.

Everyone is welcome to log in and listen to a discussion and participate in the Q&A.

We will be hearing from:

• Indra Adnan from The Alternative
• Nathan Schneider from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
• Irina (Ira) Bolychevsky from Redecentralize
• Matthew Schutte from Holochain
• Laura James from Cambridge Computer Laboratory
• Oliver Sylvester-Bradley from The Open Co-op

The panel will explore questions such as:

• What examples can you give / have you seen of group and intergroup collaboration working well?
• What do you see as the key ingredients / tenets / requirements for successful collaboration?
• Once collaboration is working within our groups, how do you think we could encourage more inter-group collaboration to achieve wider systemic impact?
• Plus, the concept contained in the posts on The DNA of Collaboration and Harmonious Working Patterns and examples and ideas from the panels’ projects.

The webinar will be held on Zoom – you will need to download the Zoom package and then click on the link to Join the webinar – there is no need to register in advance.

Where: Online, Webinar, Zoom

Categories: Beginner Collaborate Discuss Intermediate

The post Catalysing collaboration at scale – The Open Co-op appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Laura James: OPEN 2018 last week was an exciting event, not only because of the incredible people the organisers brought together, but because it felt like something new was starting to take off.

There were people from many different organisations, sectors, and backgrounds, and they found sometimes unexpected things in common with each other. Although we heard some big ideas from the stage, it felt like most attendees were actually working on things, and had practical questions and collaborative opportunities they wanted to discuss. To me, the diversity and the blend of pragmatic action and shared big vision feels like a new movement getting off the starting line.

But what is the movement? OPEN 2018 has “platform cooperatives” next to the logo and yet a lot of the most interesting conversations weren’t actually about platform co-ops. It felt like a melange of several things:

• internet technologies
• open source
• open standards and protocols (as distinct from open platforms)
• commons (not just of code, but of knowledge, public space and more); a mixture of collective goods, and public goods (echoing the Public Stack Summit)
• co-operatives, the co-op principles, and the broader co-op movement
• entrepreneurship — people trying new ideas and ventures
• networks and ecosystems of mutual support
• a desire for impact at meaningful scale (looking beyond local activities)
• resilience and distributed systems (in the technical sense)
• equality and fairness, specifically around technology and data

This is a powerful set of ideas.

They are things I’ve been thinking about and working on in different ways for some time, but I didn’t have a clear sense of them as a group or a coherent whole until now.

I wonder whether others would recognise this list as the facets of OPEN 2018?

It all fits together quite coherently, to me at least, although we’ve no catchy phrase to explain it as a whole. “Platform co-operatives” doesn’t quite do it. “Collaborative technology for the cooperative economy” is the event byline, which is good, although maybe not quite the visionary call to action a movement might coalesce around. Oli Sylvester-Bradley talked in his thoughtful introduction about “people and planet before profit” which seemed to resonate with many of us as a grand vision, although it’s perhaps a little vague? Or maybe it sets out a general dream, without defining what this particular community is doing to achieve it. Gary Alexander talked about a movement and a shared vision too: working together for mutual benefit rather than competing; a society organised for the wellbeing of people and planet (not for money and profit). He also helpfully checked what the audience thought about this (positive, but a little mixed), and admitted some of this may be too much like “new age bollocks.” Recently John Elkington, creator of the triple bottom line (where social and environmental factors are considered alongside economic ones), announced earlier this year that it was time to review whether it is still fit for purpose. So maybe we need to thrash out some more specific, compelling and useful framing…

Part of what made it feel like the emergence of a new thing was that, whilst there is a big vision for a new economy, fit for the internet age, still a little vague in some details, it didn’t feel like a hyped up rally where we all unhesitatingly cheered. Even on the main stage, as well as in smaller conversations, critical questions were posed which we do not have answers to. And there was an energy and a focus on practical action as well as reflection and learning.

Of course, there were ways the event could have been better, and I’m sure 2019’s equivalent will be different, more diverse, and maybe more interactive. But it’s quite something to convene across interests in this way and to frame an event which felt so special. Huge thanks and congratulations to Oli, Thomas and the Open.coop team!

Nathan Schneider had questions about the cooperative side of things. Are we using the language of commons, or the language of ownership? Are we escaping ownership, or doubling down on it? As I feel I’m barely on the edge of the cooperative movement, still figuring out how it works, and its relationship to technology, Nathan’s musing on whether this community is part of the traditional co-op movement or something new and different was interesting. I remain astonished how many co-operatives there are around us. In the UK there’s the Coop Group, John Lewis (as I think John Bevan said, you can take a radical stance just by getting your groceries at Waitrose), but also many others such as dairy co-ops. I learned at OPEN2018 that in the US, a surprisingly large proportion of electricity cable networks are co-operatives. I hadn’t realised that Visa and Mastercard were mutuals until early this century. But they are pretty much invisible in everyday life, in conversations about economic growth and enterprise. Cooperatives UK’s 2018 co-op economy report highlights the scale and scope of co-ops in the UK.

Nathan also talked about where we all sit relative to the mainstream, for-profit startup world. Are we doing entrepreneurship but a bit differently? Or are we doing something radically different, entirely away from concepts like disruption?

One of the things I found really encouraging at the conference was the number of enthusiastic initiatives setting out to make it easier to set up and grow co-operatives, with different combinations of toolkits, mentoring, and funding (Platform6, start.coop, incubator.coop, Solidfund, CoopStarter, and more). And boy, are there more ways to get risk financing in the co-op space than I’d realised. There’s paying a regular cash return, investment from other co-ops, token issues, specialist investment houses such as Purpose Ventures; and depending where you are, tax breaks and specialist co-op startup funds. I was surprised how different the co-op startup financing environment is in different countries. Regardless, platform co-ops are out there already, and in diverse sectors — eg. Stocksy, Savvy.coop and Arcade City. There are more tools than ever before to support scalable co-ops too, with collaborative budgeting (eg. Cobudget), decision-making (eg. Loomio), and day to day participation. There are co-ops you can work with on technical stuff, such as Outlandish or the other denizens of CoTech, and co-ops who can help you with other things such as working openly. Coming soon there will be new ways of distributing computing, organised by co-ops like RChain. Of course, there are also support networks and communities of practice, such as Enspiral.

Cristina Flesher Fominaya talked about the words we use, in a great session on narrative and the importance of stories. In particular, she highlighted that some of the most successful campaigns and movements avoided using the words that one might expect to define them; instead, focussing on stories, and getting away from polarising framings such as anti-capitalism (maybe a story about corruption might be more persuasive?). Cristina also highlighted a point I tried to make in my talk earlier that day, that collaboration is not always built on a shared discursive framework, but might involve parties with very different world views and ways of communicating.

I’m delighted to hear there will be an OPEN 2019, and looking forward to it already. (This is also motivating me to make sure that I can show up next year and feel I’ve done something useful in the interim!)

A note on hyphens: I’m sticking with “co-op.” I can’t bring myself to say “coop,” like a place chickens might live, and I think I know enough people who, like me until very recently, don’t know much about co-ops, and would be confused by coops in this business context

Some rights reserved – CC-BY-SA 4.0

Laura James  is the editor of Digital Life Collective

The post Thoughts on OPEN 2018 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following 10 ideas for action are the result of 10 years of research at the P2P Foundation on the emerging practices of new productive communities and those ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that can create livelihoods on top of shared resources. Together, they emphasize the emerging practices that can bolster the resilience of a new ethical economy. Our goal is to encourage the creation of new entities that overstep the traditional corporate form and its extractive profit-maximizing practices. What we need, instead of extractive forms of capital, is generative ideas that co-create value with and for commoners.

These 10 ideas already exist in some form, but need to be used more widely and integrated. We present them below in three sections addressing each concern (free, fair and sustainable). Each recommendation is followed by links to related resources.

I. OPEN AND FREE

1. Practice open business models based on shared knowledge.

Traditional closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. In contrast, open business models are market strategies based on both the recognition of natural abundance and the refusal to generate income and profits by making it artificially scarce.

Knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good which gains in use value the more it is shared. Although it can be shared easily and, when in digital form, at very low marginal cost, many extractive firms still use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of digitized knowledge.

Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so that extra profits can be generated. This is particularly grievous for life-saving or planet-regenerating technological knowledge.

The first action is, therefore, an ethical one, with three elements: share what can be shared; only create market value from resources that are scarce; create added value on top or alongside of these commons.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open Business models see the sections on Business Models, Open Company Formats, Open Knowledge, and post-corporate enterprises.

• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Content, Open Models, Copyright/IP, and P2P Business Models

II. FAIR

2. Practice Open Cooperativism

Many new ethical, generative forms are being created that are better aligned with the contributory commons. The key is to choose post-corporate forms that can generate livelihoods for contributing commoners. Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly market entities could take.

Open cooperatives are cooperatives with the following characteristics:

1) Mission-oriented, with a social goal related to creating shared resources.

2) Multi-stakeholder governed, including those affected by or contributing to the particular activity.

3) Constitutionally committed by their own rules to co-creating commons with the productive communities.

4) Along with other cooperatives, global in organisational scope, in order to create counter-power to extractive multinational corporations.

We see the emergence of more open forms, including “neo-tribes” (eg. the Ouishare community), or more tightly organized “neo-builds” (eg., Enspiral.org, Las Indias or the Ethos Foundation).

Even more open is the network form chosen by the open scientific hardware community Sensorica, which allows all micro-task contributions to be accounted in the reward system through open value or contributory accounting (more below), thus more tightly coupling those contributions with generated income.

• Commons Transition: Open Cooperativism Definition, Stories on Open Cooperativism. See also David Bollier’s and Pat Conaty’s Open Coops report
• For P2P Foundation documentation on Open and Platform cooperativism, see our Cooperatives Section and dedicated sections on Open and Platform Cooperativism and Open Company Formats
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Open Cooperativism and Sustainable Livelihoods

3. Practice open value or contributory accounting

Peer production is based on an open, community-driven, collaborative infrastructure, with freely contributed, distributed tasks.

The most appropriate way to reward those contributing to such a process may not be the traditional salary, and so open value accounting (or contributory accounting) have emerged.

Sensorica, mentioned above, practices this in the following way. Any contributor may add their contributions (tasks performed) into the system, logged by project number. The contributor is then assigned “karma points” after a peer evaluation. Income is then flowed to these contributions which have been accounted-for and weighted (valued), so every contributor is fairly rewarded.

Contributory accounting and similar solutions avoid situations where only a few contributors — those more closely related to the market — capture the value co-created by the much larger community. Open book accounting also insures that the (re)distribution of value is transparent for all contributors.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on open value accounting and streams, see our section on P2P Accounting

4. Insure fair distribution and benefit-sharing through CopyFair licensing

Copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the knowledge commons they require, on the condition that changes and improvements are added back to that commons. This is a great advance, but should not be abstracted from the need for fairness.

In physical production, which involves finding resources, raw materials and payments to contributors, extractive models benefit from the unfettered commercial exploitation of these commons.

Therefore, while knowledge sharing should always be maintained we should also demand reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of the commons. This would create a level playing field for the ethical economic entities that presently internalize social and environmental costs.

CopyFair licenses, which allow knowledge sharing while requesting reciprocity in exchange for the right of commercialization, would facilitate achieving this.

• Commons Transition: An introduction to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses
• For P2P Foundation documentation on licenses see Licensing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on CopyFair licenses.

5. Practice solidarity and mitigate the risks of work and life through “commonfare” practices

The power of nation-states has gradually weakened as one result of financial and neoliberal globalization. We are seeing a strong, integrated effort to dismantle the vital solidarity mechanisms that were once embedded in the welfare state models.

While we may yet not have the power to prevent this destruction, it is imperative that we reconstruct distributed solidarity mechanisms, a practice which we call commonfare.

Examples all over the world, such as the Broodfonds (NL), Friendsurance (Germany), and the health sharing ministries (U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France, demonstrate new forms of distributed solidarity which can be developed to allay risks to life and work. We are particularly happy about the emergence of labour mutuals like the European cooperative SMart-eu, which represents the missing link between the precariat and salaried workers by offering a mutual guarantee fund and “virtual salariat” (i.e. insertion into social protections) for autonomous workers.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our P2P Solidarity Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Healthcare

III. SUSTAINABLE

6. Use open and sustainable designs for an open source circular economy

The practice of planned obsolescence — a feature, not a bug, for profit-maximizing corporations — is alien to people operating in a context of shared, abundant resources. Open productive communities insure maximum participation through modularity and granularity.

Using open and sustainable designs for producing sustainable good and services is highly recommended for ethical-entrepreneurial entities.

• For P2P Foundation documentation, see our Design Section
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on the Open Source Circular Economy

7. Move toward mutual coordination of production through open supply chains and open book accounting

What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the market, mutual coordination is for the commons.

In a circular economy, the output of one production process is used as an input for another. Closed value chains won’t help us achieve a sustainable circular economy; neither will non-transparent negotiations for any form of cooperation.

But through open supply chains, entrepreneurial coalitions that are interdependent with a collaborative commons can create ecosystems of collaboration. Here, production processes become transparent, and every participant can adapt his or her behaviour based on the knowledge openly available in the network.

There is no need for overproduction when the network’s actual production realities become common knowledge.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on Mutual Coordination

8. Practice cosmo-localization

“What is light is global, and what is heavy is local.” This is the new principle animating commons-based peer production, in which knowledge is globally shared and production can take place on demand — based on real needs — through a network of distributed coworking spaces and microfactories.

Studies have shown that up to two-thirds of matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport. Clearly, this is unsustainable. A return to localized production is sine qua non for the transition towards sustainable production.

• More information: Cosmo-localism and the futures of material production
• Read our P2P Lab articles on the topic here:

1. Article 1 [2015] “Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model”. text
2. Article 2 [2015] “Towards a political ecology of the digital economy: Socio-environmental implications of two competing value models”. text

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sustainable_Manufacturing.

9. Mutualize physical infrastructures

The misnamed sharing economy, from AirBnB to Uber, has shown the potential of matching idle, under- or unused resources, but in the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reducing resource use.

Our means of production, including machines, can be mutualized and self-owned by all those that create value. Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and “fairshares” forms of distributed ownership are tools to help us co-own our infrastructures of production.

Co-working, skills-sharing, ridesharing are just a few examples of the many ways we can re-use and share resources to dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of our consumption.

• For P2P Foundation documentation on sustainable manufacturing, see our section on Sharing
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on Sharing

10. Mutualize generative capital

The 38 percent financial tax owed on all goods and services should be abolished; we must transform our monetary system, and substantively augment the use of mutual credit systems. Generative forms of capital cannot rely on an extractive money supply based on compound interest payable to extractive banks.

• Commons Transition: See features on Capital for the Commons and the Commons Strategies Group report of the same name.
• For P2P Foundation documentation on generative capital see Peerfunding and the Democratic Money Initiative
• P2P Foundation Blog: Stories on P2P Money

In conclusion: What the world, humanity and the environment that sustains us needs is an economic system driven by free, fair and sustainable practices. It is our belief that the holistic adoption of the recommendations and practices above will accelerate this change. We can’t afford to wait any longer, so let’s get to work!

• Cross-posted from Shareable
• Lead image by Josef Stuefer, “Open” image by Open Knowledge, “Fair” image by OpenSource.com, “Sustainable” image by USAID Nepal

The post 10 Ways to Accelerate the Peer-to-Peer and Commons Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

True sharing organisations share the organisation too, by making members owners with real democratic voting rights, enabling them to have a say in the decision by which they are affected.

Saturday night is not the time most people chose to meet to discuss disrupting democracy.  But that’s what happened at the Platform Co-ops event in London on the 21st of May 2016.

Whilst most of Brick Lane was quaffing vast quantities of craft beer and sipping organic low-fat soya lattes with tofu sprinkles whist discussing how awesome it was that #rainbowunicornkittens was trending on twitter, over the road at New Speak House, a collection of hackers, designers, systems thinkers and aspiring cooperators gathered to discuss the bourgeoning movement know as Platform Co-ops.

New speak House is an amazing place founded to “foster the creation of technology to disrupt the UK political / media / government complex” and it is doing exactly that. It’s an events venue, community space, residential incubator and general hangout set up for people who want to change society with technology, and meet other people with similar interests, the perfect place for progressive peers to plot.

The Platform Co-ops event was organised and sponsored by the excellent Outlandish which meant everyone was suitably furnished with bagels and beer absolutely free, a fitting start to a co-operative gathering, which was kicked of by Nathan Schneider, organiser of the Platform Co-ops event in New York last November.

Nathan is a journalist who, along with Trebor Scholz, has helped elevate the subject of Platform Co-ops into the zeitgeist. Whether the newfound interest in Platform Co-ops simply reflects the growing unease with the rise of the deathstar platforms like Uber, or is the makings of a movement to disrupt democracy remains to be seen but the buzz from the brains at New Speak house certainly implied the later.

Nathan Schneider

Nathan gave a great introduction, framing the debate superbly; it’s all about ownership and governance. The so called “sharing economy” platforms which “share” their apps with consumers and producers whilst rinsing value from them to make venture capitalists rich, is not really sharing at all. True sharing organisations share the organisation too, by making members owners with real democratic voting rights, enabling them to have a say in the decision by which they are affected.

Felix Weth

Next up was Felix Weth, founder Fairmondo, a German, co-operative, alternative to Amazon, which is owned and managed by its members. Felix spoke extremely candidly about the difficulties of putting Platform Co-operativism into practice. Building a working alternative to the worlds biggest online retailer is never going to be easy and it was refreshing to hear about Fairmondo’s open philosophy. Felix showed how any profits they generate are split four ways with 25% going to: Owners of shares in the co-op, People who have earned Fair Founding Points, to other Non Profits, and the final 25% to upscaling Fairmondo. I’ve never seen a founder of a company openly present a slide showing the status of their bank account before! We’ll be keeping a keen eye out for the UK version of Fairmondo, coming soon.

Fairmondo’s 4/4 model of profit distribution

Last up was Sarah Gold, creator of the concept “Alternet”, an open source, peer produced, run, owned and maintained version of the internet. Sarah’s work on Personal Data Licences which was exhibited at the Big Bang Data exhibition at Sommerset House kicked off some interesting discussions. In a post Snowden world the idea of owning your own data, as well as the platforms and other organisations upon which you depend is an inciting proposition.

Sarah Gold’s Data Licences concept

If the growing number of other examples of member owned platforms and co-ops we heard about are anything to go by, Platform Co-operativism is a concept that is only just getting started. Whether it can actually manage to disrupt democracy remains to be seen but the only way that is going to happen is if we (the people) make it happen.

Sign up at 2016.open.coop to be kept up to date about the two day conference on Platform Co-ops that is being planned for London later this year.

The post Outlandish – Platform Co-ops event appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As “death star platforms” such as Airbnb and Uber continue their pursuit of global domination, an alternative is rising in its wake.

Platform cooperatives, which share the value they create with the users they depend on, are on the rise. As Shareable co-founder Neal Gorenflo writes in How Platform Co-ops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy, “Platform coops combine a cooperative business structure with an online platform to deliver a real-world service.”

Gorenflo asks, “What if Uber was owned and governed by its drivers? What if Airbnb was owned and governed by its hosts?” We don’t have to wait to find out. A growing number of platform cooperatives are making their presence known on a global scale. Below are just 11 platform co-ops that are changing the way people organize, run businesses, create value, and share the wealth. There are many more.

1. Fairmondo

Fairmondo is a digital, co-operative version of eBay, where sellers on the platform are also its owners. Launched by Felix Weth in Germany in 2013, the platform is, as Chelsea Rustrum writes, “rooted in an ethos of open source, open innovation, and a commons-based society. It has funded itself through a series of successful crowdfunding campaigns that have raised hundreds of thousands of Euros in member equity.”

To scale globally, the Fairmondo team plans to create an international network of country-based co-ops feeding into the Fairmondo platform.

2. Stocksy

Stocksy is a stock photo site where contributing photographers are also owners. A “highly curated collection” of royalty-free stock photos, the platform is a cooperative that believes in creative integrity, fair profit sharing, co-ownership, and every voice being heard. It’s a new twist on traditional co-ops. As they state on the website, “Think more artist respect and support, and less patchouli.”

Contributing Stocksy photographers receive 50% of a Standard License Purchase and 75% of an Extended License Purchase. Every Stocksy contributor receives a share of the company.

3. Backfeed

Backfeed is a platform to create platform cooperatives, all powered by the blockchain. Backfeed bills itself as, “a social operating system for decentralized organizations.” It enables massive, open-source collaboration without central coordination. Using a blockchain-based operating system, the Israeli company’s infrastructure comprises decentralized management tools, equity-sharing schemes, crowdsourcing mechanisms, and instruments for the collaborative evaluation and curation of content.

With a goal to enable the bootstrapping of decentralized organizations on top of the blockchain as easily as deploying a website, Backfeed can fuel a variety of ventures, including “decentralized journalism, insurance, ride-sharing applications and any other enterprise that would benefit from the decentralized, indirect coordination of large groups of individuals.”

4. Juno

Photo: Nancy Xu (CC-BY)

A ridesharing company that is taking on Uber, Juno has reserved 50% of its equity for platform drivers. The company is being built by an experienced team of startup veterans, including founder Talmon Marco, who sold his messaging app Viber to Rakuten for $900 million, and is well-funded with backing coming from Viber founders rather than outside VCs.

The New York City-based startup, which recently launched service in the Big Apple, is reportedly only taking a 10% commission of each ride (Uber takes 20-35%), and is giving drivers the option to be contractors or employees (if they want to be exclusive to Juno).

5. Union Taxi

Union Taxi in Denver, Colorado, a driver-owned taxi cooperative, represents a growing trend. Drivers are increasingly organizing taxi cooperatives for better pay and working conditions than what traditional taxi companies and Uber can offer. They also must compete successfully. Union Taxi appears to be doing both. They offer a convenient service with e-hailing (like Uber) and driver ownership and control of the business.

CWA (Communications Workers of America) Local 7777 helped the drivers form the cooperative and plays an ongoing support role. By driving for Union, cab drivers cut their car lease rate by two-thirds. As Lisa Bolton, president of the union told Shareable, “By far, the biggest advantage was the lease rate.” This enabled drivers to work less, “which gives them more time at home. They were taking home a lot more of their money that they were making, and everybody was contributing the same amount to the business.”

PDX Yellow Cab is a similar taxi cooperative in Portland, Oregon, where Somali cab drivers broke away from traditional cab companies to form their own—the first major Somali-owned business in Portland. Union Cab Cooperative in Portland is also fairly new (pictured above), though neither cooperative offer e-hailing yet.

6. VTC Cab

After Uber cut fares across Paris, some of its drivers created a competing service, VTC Cab. Modeled after Uber, the ride-sharing platform aims to give drivers more control over their business and provide passengers an opportunity to support a French company.

As the app’s founder, Mohammed Radi, told the Verge, “We want to re-establish and regain our rights over Uber. Uber is not representative of our community… They are a technology company which has no connection with the world of transportation. So they treat human beings like a number — you know, like a figure on a computer. And being a number, as a driver, it’s a very bad feeling.”

7. Modo

Modo is a Vancouver-based consumer car sharing co-op. Launched in 1997, with just two cars and 16 members, Modo has grown to 16,000 members and a fleet of over 500 sports cars, sedans, trucks, SUVs, vans and hybrids—all available to share at $4/hour through a smartphone app and website. Member-owners are shareholding members of the co-op which means they get a vote as well as the best rates for carsharing.

8. Timefounder

Timefounder is a “fair and elegant equity split system where you will love to wake up and work on projects you will end up owning with the rest of the team members.” The app allows founders to be fair with the people who invest time in a project and allows experts to invest time in projects and get future shares or others benefits. Based in Barcelona, the Timefounder team aims to “enable collaboration with fair equity split.”

9. Enspiral

Enspiral is a collective of social enterprises and freelancers that makes, uses, and distributes free apps for decision making and budgeting. Based in New Zealand, the platform, which is self-described as a “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” has a goal to help their organization, as well as other organizations and movements, run democratically. As the website states, “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground.”

10. Tapazz

Tapazz is a peer to peer carsharing co-op in Belgium. A recognized cooperative company, it enables shareholders who believe in the company’s social mission (to ensure a sustainable mobility society) to participate in its growth. Shareholders can invest, produce and create a transparent structure to ensure sustainable mobility. As an added bonus, Tapazz “offers space for co-creating and collaboration, so it really is a business of everyone.”

11. Peerby

Peerby is a Dutch neighbor-to-neighbor goods sharing platform. The company recently raised $2.2 million from users in a recent crowdfunding campaign, which makes users the majority shareholder class.

A certified B corp, Peerby plans to use the funds, which surpasses the total venture capital dollars the startup raised previously and makes it one of the most successful international crowdfunding campaigns ever, for product development and international expansion of a new business model named Peerby Go, with a specific focus on the UK and North America.

What are your favorite platform co-ops? Please share in the comments.

Cross-posted from Shareable.net and authored by Cat Johnson

The post 11 Platform Cooperatives Creating a Real Sharing Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It has been through my affection for and participation in the FLOSS movement that I came to this critique. Those who use FLOSS self-consciously are overwhelmingly those who enjoy privileges like whiteness, maleness, and affluence. Lots more people benefit from this stuff as users of Firefox, WordPress, and LAMP servers, but huge portions of the economic benefit end up with shareholders of big companies like Google and IBM. These companies also help finance and sit on the boards of major FLOSS foundations. The result is products like Android, an operating system that employs Linux to carry out perhaps the most powerful engine of corporate surveillance ever invented.

FLOSS was the result of an ingenious series of legal hacks, engineered in most cases by well-meaning commoners seeking only to enable commons-based peer production. They have successfully protected their commons from the most direct forms of corporate enclosure. They’ve developed remarkable forms of democratic self-governance, like the Debian Constitution. But this arrangement has also produced valuable, low-cost raw material for corporations that are designed to produce wealth for investors, not livelihoods for commoners.

These corporations (reinforcing tendencies of hacker cultures) have little interest in seeing FLOSS become accessible to non-hacker users. As a result, it has been very rare that, for all my enthusiasm, I succeed in persuading friends to use such tools. And since the economic rewards for FLOSS use and contributions are usually indirect (i.e., social capital that aids in securing a lucrative tech job), people with less free time (disproportionately women) or extra income (disproportionately people of color) face barriers to participation. FLOSS has wonderful potential for nourishing truly liberating commons, but so far this promise has been pretty effectively hindered.

The platform co-op movement has close affinities with FLOSS. Lots of tech co-ops develop exclusively open products; through FLOSS, platform co-ops like Fairmondo find ways to spread and grow through federation rather than globalization; there have been eloquent calls for “open co-ops.” FLOSS principles like transparency and open participation resonate beautifully with cooperative principles. But what we seek to add is democratic control and equitable enjoyment of the benefits. We call for solidarity with workers at all levels of the platform economy and data sovereignty for user-contributors. It’s an economic-justice layer atop—or, better, at the root of—the FLOSS stack. Without that, I’m not going to scold my busy friends if they don’t run Linux (though if they want to, I’ll gleefully help).

Finally we are beginning to hack corporate ownership design with the same gusto and imagination with which the progenitors of FLOSS hacked intellectual property. We’re coming up with democratic financing, open companies, and diverse, multi-stakeholder co-ops. And we’re also rethinking the rules of the digital commons. The “copyfarleft” licenses of Dmytri Kleiner and the P2P Foundation, for instance, are designed to protect commons from exploitation by extractive companies while allowing their use by democratic and non-commercial enterprises. Some platform co-ops deem it necessary to use full copyright. There is disagreement about intellectual property in the platform co-op community, and I view this as a good thing; robust debate is needed to address the challenge of cultivating the commons while also doing business democratically.

In capitalism, commons that don’t challenge capital will end up serving capital. Our digital commons are doing little to aid low-wage workers who lack control over their platform labor markets, or precarious consumers targeted for scams due to corporate surveillance of their online habits. We need commons that serve commoners.

At least since the Charter of the Forest, commoners have had to protect their commons from the greedy hands of the lords. We can pull the levers of corporate ownership law to do this by cooperativizing our networks and platforms. But I hope that ownership restrictions are not our chief objective; these are a strategy for cultivating a commons-based society whose abundance we can share on equitable terms.

Photo by opensourceway

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“The common vision of Fairmondo is to create a true alternative to the big online marketplaces and thereby provide a model for others who want to set up democratic and fair business at a larger scale. My personal long term vision is to create a multinational cooperative that is strong enough to outcompete the very big players currently dominating the market.”

The above is a quote from co-founder Felix Weth in an interview conducted by Chelsea Rustrum for Shareable.

Fairmondo wants to create a scalable fair ecommerce platform and is one of the pioneering platform cooperatives with a innovative redistribution scheme that honours unpaid contributions.

* Chelsea Rustrum: How did you originally fund Fairmondo and how are you sustaining it now? Did the crowdfunders automatically become members or was that a separate process? How does all of this work legally?

Felix Weth: We originally funded Fairmondo through crowdfunding, using a platform to distribute coop-shares. The crowdfunding platform thereby provided an escrow service—they collected the membership applications and once our campaign had successfully ended, they handed the applications to us. We thus applied the requirements of German cooperative law to the crowdfund. Since then, we regularly do a membership campaign. Today, our monthly costs are covered through income from fees and subscriptions by customers.

We used the German platform startnext.com. With them, we developed a solution of how we could crowdfund coop shares through their platform. Two examples are (both still under our former name Fairnopoly): startnext.com/fairnopoly and startnext.com/fairnopoly2

So far, we’ve done two campaigns for raising member shares. Another one is scheduled this spring.

* What is your business structure in Germany and what would it be in the U.S. if you localized here as well?

Fairmondo is registered as a cooperative, according to German law. In order to preserve our vision even if the project grows big, we developed a set of principles and bylaws that we call “Cooperative 2.0”. They consist of seven core elements, which any new Fairmondo chapter needs to adapt. Among those are mechanisms to ensure democratic ownership and accountability, as well as an uncompromising commitment to transparency. Internally, local coops are largely free to adapt their preferred modes of operation. In Germany we are adapting a holacracy type of process.

Here are the seven core elements of Cooperative 2.0:

* 9/10 people have to agree to change anything in the general principles
* Democratic accountability to all stakeholders
* Independence of individual vested interests
* Uncompromising transparency
* Distributed profits (see 4/4 profit distribution model)
* The magic of the crowd
* Open source

* What is your management model?

There is no specific management model attached to Fairmondo’s coop 2.0 model. In accordance with German coop law, we have a managing board that is responsible (and liable) for running the company. Formally, this board takes decisions and is free to set up internal organizational processes.

The one thing that is special in our model is that the managing board is elected by the employees. This enables employees to elect a new board if they do not support the management style implemented by the existing board, or if they feel they do not get sufficient voice in the design of these processes. Combined with the principle of uncompromising transparency, employees are thus empowered to make sure that the company is run in a way they are comfortable with.

The managing board knows it can be replaced by the employees, so it has a direct incentive to work for an open and respectful organizational culture and to listen to their needs, suggestions and critique. Which specific style or model suits the needs of the team best, is really left to the people in place.

In our coop back in Germany, we are in the process of introducing a holacracy variant, because it comes closest to what we have been practising so far. But this can change when people change, when organizational growth requires different solutions, or when we learn of new useful management models.

* How do you pay your employees? Do you feel they are adequately compensated or does that come once there is a surplus?

Right now we work on a very limited budget and this forces us to work with very moderate salaries. We did and do communicate this constraint on our job ads and interviews. At one moment we did have to reduce our team, which at the time was mainly paid through the starting capital we raised in our crowdfunding campaign. We then had to restructure into a setup that is covered by our monthly income.

As we have monthly presentations of our budget situation with the team, everybody was aware of this. The restructuring was then a quite difficult process in which we brought employees’ needs, business needs, and budget limitations into a balance that worked for us. Also, Fairmondo is supported by many volunteers (including the managing board), and some employees choose to work more time than they are paid for.

In order to compensate for this, our Cooperative 2.0 model uses a special “Fair Founding Point” system. For every unpaid hour contributed to Fairmondo, members receive an equal number of 200 points. These points are registered in the bylaws and entitle those members to an extra share of the surplus once the cooperative works successfully enough to actually make one.

* Can you please explain your four-pronged approach for distributing surplus?

Fairmondo aims at very broad membership (We now have over 2,000 members, if successful it should have hundreds of thousands.). We therefore defined very clearly what should happen with any surplus in case our business grows big:

* One quarter is distributed to members through their shares
* One quarter is distributed through the Fair Founding Points just mentioned
* One quarter goes as donations to nonprofits that the users decide on
* The last quarter is used for developing the wider Fairmondo project”

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Universitat de Oberta Catalunya — Open University of Catalonia — just published the following essay of mine as part of its “Open Thoughts” series.  The UOC blog explores the benefits and limitations of various forms of peer production: well worth a look!

From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of the chief challenges that network-based peer production must meet if we are going to unleash the enormous value that distributed, autonomous production can

From open access platforms to managed digital commons: that is one of the chief challenges that network-based peer production must meet if we are going to unleash the enormous value that distributed, autonomous production can create.

The open platform delusion

We are accustomed to regarding open platforms as synonymous with greater freedom and innovation. But as we have seen with the rise of Google, Facebook and other tech giants, open platforms that are dominated by large corporations are only “free” within the boundaries of market norms and the given business models. Yes, open platforms provide many valuable services at no (monetary) cost to users. But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product. In this case, our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”

In this sense, many open platforms are not so benign. Many of them are techno-economic fortresses, bolstered by the structural dynamics of the “power law,” which enable dominant corporate players to monopolize and monetize a given sector of online activity. Market power based on such platforms can then be used to carry out surveillance of users’ lives; erect barriers to open interoperability and sharing, sometimes in anticompetitive ways; and quietly manipulate the content and “experience” that users may have on such platforms.

Such outcomes on “open platforms” should not be entirely surprising; they represent the familiar quest of capitalist markets to engineer the acquisition of exclusive assets and monetize them. The quarry in this case is our consciousness, creativity and culture. The more forward-looking segments of capital realize that “owning a platform” (with stipulated terms of participation) can be far more lucrative than owning exclusive intellectual property rights for content.

So for those of us who care about freedom in an elemental human and civic sense — beyond the narrow mercantilist “freedoms” offered by capitalist markets — the critical question is how to preserve certain inalienable human freedoms and shared cultural spaces. Can our free speech, freedom of association and freedom to interconnect with each other and innovate flourish if the dominant network venues must first satisfy the demands of investors, corporate boards and market metrics?

« Open platforms that are dominated by large corporations are only “free” within the boundaries of market norms and the given business models »

If we are serious about protecting human freedoms that have a life beyond markets, I believe we must begin to develop new modes of “platform co-operativism” that go beyond standard forms of “private” corporate control. We need to pioneer technical, organizational and financial forms that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing. We must be able to avoid the coerced and undisclosed surrender of personal information and digital identity to third-parties who may or may not be reliable stewards of such information.

There are other reasons to move to commons-based platforms. As David P. Reed showed in a seminal 1999 paper,¹ the value generated by networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model based on “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of viewers), to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n²).

But by far the most valuable networks are those that facilitate group affiliations to pursue shared goals. (I call such groups commons). Reed found that the value of “group forming networks,” in which people have the tools for “free and responsible association for common purposes,” to be 2ⁿ, a fantastically large number. His analysis suggests that the value generated by Facebook, Twitter, and other proprietary network platforms remain highly rudimentary because participants have only limited tools for developing trust and confidence in each other (open source tools would subvert the business model). In short, the value potential of the commons has been deliberately stifled.

For all of these reasons, our imaginations and aspirations must begin to shift their focus from open platforms to digital commons. Self-organized commoners must be able to control the terms of their interactions and governance, and to reap the fruits of their own collaboration and sharing.

Towards the CopyFair license

A variety of legal and technological innovations are now starting to address the structural limits of (market-financed) open platforms as vehicles for commoning. These initiatives remain somewhat emergent, yet they are filled with great promise. They aspire to empower digital commoners in resisting market capture and enclosure of their collectively created content, community norms and identity. Corporate platforms privilege the social monoculture of producer/consumer relationships and only those social behaviors that comport with the host-company’s business model (or more generally, with market relationships). By contrast, self-organized commons enable richer, more diverse and meaningful types of freedom and culture.

The basic problem, however, is that digital commons tend to have trouble growing and sustaining themselves. They do not have adequate organizational and governance structures nor adequate financial support. However, a new generation of innovations may help address these problems.

One possibility now being explored, for example, is “commons-based reciprocity licenses,” sometimes known as CopyFair. These proposed licenses based on copyright ownership would allow no-cost sharing among members of a commons, but require payment by any commercial users of the community’s work. The idea is now being developed by Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation and open-agriculture hardware developers, among others. Unlike the Creative Commons NonCommercial license, which absolutely stops commercial development of a line of information or creative work, the CopyFair license would allow commercialization, but on the basis of mandatory (monetized) reciprocity.

The potential of the blockchain

Another instrument for converting open platforms into digital commons is the blockchain ledger, the software innovation that lies at the heart of Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin itself has been designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is significant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of a digital object (for now, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body.

This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object — a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote or digital identity asserted by an individual — is the “real thing” and not a forgery? By using a searchable online “ledger” that keeps track of all transactions (i.e., bitcoins), blockchain technology solves this problem by acting as a kind of permanent record maintained by a vast distributed peer network. This makes it far more secure than data kept at a centralized location because the authenticity of a bitcoin registered among so many nodes in the network is virtually impossible to corrupt.

« We need to pioneer technical, organizational and financial forms that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing »

Because of these capabilities, a recently released report suggests that blockchain technology could provide a critical infrastructure for building what are called “distributed collaborative organizations” (DCO, and sometimes “distributed autonomous organizations”).² These are essentially self-organized online commons. A DCO could use blockchain technology to give its members specified rights within the organization, which could be managed and guaranteed by the blockchain. These rights, in turn, could be linked to the conventional legal system to make the rights legally cognizable and enforceable.

One rudimentary example of how the blockchain might be used to facilitate a commons: In the US, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed using blockchain technology to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses coordinated as commons. The ledger would keep track of how much energy a given homeowner generates and shares with others, and consumes. In effect the system would enable the efficient organization of decentralized solar grids and a “green currency” that could serve as a medium of exchange within solar microgrids or networks, helping to propel adoption of solar panels. The blockchain amounts to a network-based architecture for enabling commons-based governance.

Smart transactions

This field of experimentation may yield another breakthrough tool for forging digital commons: smart contracts. These are dynamic software modules operating in an architecture of shared protocols (much like TCP/IP or http) that could enable new types of group governance, decision-making and rules-enforcement on open network platforms.

We are already familiar with rudimentary — and corporate-oriented versions — of this idea, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM), an encryption/authentication system that gives companies the ability to constrain how users may use their legally purchased technologies (DVDs, CDs, etc.). As the power of networked collaboration has become clear, however, many tech innovators now recognize that the real challenge is not how to lock up and privatize digital artifacts, but how to assure that they can be reliably shared on open platforms in legally enforceable ways, for the benefit of a defined group of contributors or for everyone.

« A realm of software innovation is trying to blend familiar co-operative structures with open network platforms to enable collective deliberation and governance through online systems »

There are now many active efforts underway to devise technical systems for deploying “smart” legal agents whose transactions would also be enforceable under conventional law. The “transactions” could, of course, be used to invent new types of markets, but they also could be used to create new types of commons. Ultimately, the two realms may bleed into each other and create social hybrids that conjoin community commitments and market activity.

A related realm of software innovation is trying to blend familiar co-operative structures with open network platforms to enable collective deliberation and governance — “commoning” — through online systems. Some of the more notable experiments include Loomio, DemocracyOS and LiquidFeedback. Each of these seeks to enable members of online networks to carry on direct, sustained and somewhat complicated discussions, and then to clarify group sentiment and reach decisions that participants see as binding, legitimate and meaningful.

Networks of peer producers

In a natural extension of such capacities, “open value networks” (OVN) are attempts to enable bounded networks of participants to carry out crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of knowledge, co-budgeting among its identifiable members. “Open value networks” such as Enspiral and Sensorica have been described as an “operating system for a new kind of organization” and a “pilot project for the new economy.” OVNs consist of digital platforms that facilitate new modes of decentralized and self-organized social governance, production and livelihoods among members of distinct communities. The networks are organized in ways that let anyone to contribute to the project, and be rewarded based on their contributions, as measured by actual contributions, experience and other collectively determined criteria.

Unlike “conventional commons” that tend to eschew market-based activity, open value networks have no reservations about engaging with markets; OVNs simply wish to maintain their organizational and cultural integrity as commons-based peer producers. This means open, horizontal and large-scale cooperation and coordination; responsible stewardship of the shared wealth and assets while allowing individual access, use, authorship and ownership of resources “where appropriate”; careful accounting of individual “inputs and outcomes” via a common ledger system; and the distribution of fair rewards based on individual contributions to the project. Some notable keywords for describing OVNs: equipotentiality, anti-credentialism, self-selection, communal validation and holoptism.

As mentioned earlier, these initiatives to create new technical, organizational and financing for platform cooperativism are still emerging and debated in meetings as the one taking place soon in New York City. They will require further experimentation and development to make them fully functional and scalable. Yet they promise to provide attractive, potentially breakthrough alternatives to business-driven platforms that stipulate the terms of participation and do not facilitate the mutualized benefit among commoners. By providing more trustworthy systems for genuine commoning and user sovereignty and control, these new forms could soon enable digital commons — and hybrid forms of user-driven markets — to surpass the value-creating capacities of conventional open platforms.

Footnotes:
1. See also David Bollier and John H. Clippinger, The Next Great Internet Disruption: Authority and Governance.
2. See the report Distributed Collaborative Organizations: Distributed Networks & Regulatory Frameworks, written by people associated with Swarm, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, New York Law School and the MIT Media Lab. See also Rachel O’Dwyer, The Revolution Will (Not) Be Decentralized; and Morgen E. Peck, The Future of the Web Looks a Lot Like Bitcoin. The blockchain and related legal issues are being actively discussed in a series of global workshops known as “Blockchain (R)evolution,” convened by Primavera De Filippi, Constance Choi and John Clippinger. For a broader introduction to this general topic, see John H. Clippinger and David Bollier, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society (ID3, 2014).

Lead image by OpenSource.com

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