How platform cooperatives deal with the size-identity tradeoff?

The first presenter was Jovana Karanovic. She is precisely the founder of Reshaping Work, and researcher at the KIN Center for Digital Innovation at VU Amsterdam. Following Carmelo Cenammo, the starting point of her talk was a trade-off that platforms face: the one of the platform size that leverages on growth of network effects (the winner-takes-all logic of Uber, Airbnb, and Deliveroo), and the other being the platform identity, which leverages on market positioning, platform quality and distinct content. The examples Jovana pointed out for the later were Grab and Careem, which beat big platforms by attending the particular preferences of Southeast Asia and Middle East users, respectively.

Her research question, along with her colleagues Hans Berends and Yuval Engel, is the following: how do platform cooperatives deal with the tradeoff between platform size and identity?

To tackle this question, they are comparing four case studies of platform cooperatives across four different industries: Wehelpen (care), Partago (car rental), Stocksy (stock photography), and Fairbnb (vacation rentals). Wehelpen and Partago look for “local” network effects (market segments); Stocksy and Fairbnb look for “global” network effects (entire market).

The key here, in my opinion, is to think if the specific strategic management of the local/global tradeoffs by platform cooperatives helps them to compete with platforms that leverage on ridiculously large financial resources to lower prices and “buy” clients to boost the network effect. These are the insights she presented:

– In terms of control mechanisms, Wehelpen and Partagon bet for an identity-driven market positioning through communication, set different rules for each community they serve, and use the cost of platform affiliation as a mean of control as well. On their “global side”, Stocksy and Fairbnb establish the following control mechanisms: quality base selection (e.g Stocky selects only top photographers) and selection based on adherence to values/principles (e.g. Fairbnb has 1 host 1 house policy).

– In terms of differentiation strategies, Wehelpen and Partago enforce a strong identity and adapts the offer to local particularities. If I understand this correctly, the alternative organization flavor (and its potential impact in terms of purpose and sustainability) can be a distinctive factor in terms of identity. They also stress (of course) the importance of local adaptation and market-segment specialization (which can leverage in their connections and social ties with existing local communities). Stocksy and Fairbnb, restrict market access on the supply side, which leads to offering more consistency. Also, platform architectures can support the identity, attracting a specific type of user (again, e.g., sustainability-driven).

I think that these insights support something that I wrote elsewhere: the fact that they can design a business model not-investor-centered can suppose a greater value proposition to patrons (and other stakeholders). Also, there is the fact that being alternative forms of organization helps them to differentiate their identity in terms of competitive advantage, which is something I was not sure it would happen.

What couriers think about platform cooperatives in Barcelona?

Ricard Espelt, from Dimmons research group at Open University of Catalonia, showed preliminary results of their research on platform couriers working in Barcelona: they are isolated from the perspective of law and they had to rely on emergent or alternative unions. Nor them nor the stakeholders have reached an agreement on how to solve their problems. They are themselves divided in between those that favor the creation of alternative- more coop-oriented-platforms, while others rather prefer to fight for labor rights in the current platforms.

The good news is, therefore, that there are couriers open to alternative forms of organization such as platform cooperatives. I do not think that it is crucial to know how many are they, but their existence, for that fact changes completely the feasibility of their existence. That is important, particularly in those countries in which legislation is leaning towards profit-oriented platforms.

Do algorithms contribute to shape the legal status of platform workers?

Anna Ginès i Fabrellas, professor and researcher at ESADE Business School, took a fascinating look at platform algorithms in terms of how they actually intervene/shape the legal status of workers:

• In terms of the debate “platforms as technological firms that just mediate between offer and demand”, vs “platforms as service providers” (algorithmic management), Anna convincingly argued that the role of the algorithm is so crucial in managing the delivery of services that this platforms cannot escape from the fact that they are service providers. And by the same token, platforms are a relevant productive infrastructure.
• When looking at algorithms as subordination, she showed that the massive data collected by geolocalization systems turns out to be a very effective form of control/management.
• Finally, the nature of platform algorithms (or at least the current ones) kills any dimension of workers entrepreneurship, for they adopt the most relevant decisions.

Anna paid attention as well to the new forms of worker’s precarity, and the different approaches to battle them. Being platform cooperatives one of them, she also pointed to the French regulation of platform worker’s rights, or the proposal of an entirely new legal regime for them.

As I see it, platform cooperatives are the straight-forward solution, because it not requires legal changes on their side.

Would a UBI help a transition to platform cooperatives?

Finally, Melisa Renau, also from Dimmons at UOC, presented her analytical model for conflict social relationships, applied to the courier’s case. Her research question is “How and if UBI could affect power relations between employers and workers by increasing and improving workers’ exit and voice options in the platform economy. Her elegant model, that draws from the Hirschman’s triangle and the Birnbaum and Wispelaere exit options models, showed that UBI is not a silver bullet:

• the empowering potential of a UBI depends on endogenous and exogenous variables.
• Providing economic independence does not mean ensuring equality,

While there is a hype around UBI, I see much more desirable the platform cooperative option, based on workers ownership and multistakeholder governance, (or open value networks, for that matter).

Finally, some of the best outcomes of the event came from the intervention of platform workers. I participated in a walk with two women that founded a union for cleaning ladies like them that deserved a dissertation at UAB. They showed outstanding intelligence, courage, and dignity in front of the abuses of the platform business model. And I could not help to tell them that I will contact them to talk about cooperative platforms.

New Reshaping Work regional events are on the way at Amsterdam, Novi Sad and Stockholm. They will equally stress the importance of research-based knowledge. Keep your eye on the growing list… or organize one in your city!

The post Prospective future of platform cooperatives: my takeaways from Reshaping Work Barcelona 2019 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This is part of a series of articles that unpack some key insights I have had from being part of the OuiShare network for the past 6 years.

When I first joined OuiShare, in 2012, there was a lot more excitement than structure. We had an association in France, a list of values and a guide on how to organize a “OuiShare Drink”. The Sharing Economy was about to become a very hyped topic, attracting the attention of many early adopters.

Because that was the core subject that OuiShare had emerged around, we found ourselves in the heart of the excitement, mobilizing dozens of self-organized groups that enabled us to run almost 200 OuiShare events in 75 cities less than two years into our existence.

There was an influx of excited people from all over the world who wanted to get involved, start new projects and local communities. There was so much creativity and energy, it was baffling.

Accompanying this growth and increasing level of activity was also a lack of clarity. How does work get done? Who makes decisions? Who can join, how? None of these questions were answered yet, which led to tension. It seemed like it was time to get more structured, quickly… or so we thought.

We embarked on a journey to “design OuiShare”. In the summer of 2013, a handful of active members secluded themselves for two months to go through an intense “organizations design process”. The outcome would be a clear manual with rules and processes for how we would work together. When the summer was over, the team came back with the first version of the OuiShare handbook, a 40 page document.

Unfortunately, it met the sad fate of many such documents, it ended up in a (virtual) drawer (the google drive), gathering dust. We did not use it, because it did not match the lived reality of how people behaved in the organization.

Yet the knowledge that certain rules now existed in OuiShare made many people feel constrained and less empowered to take initiative. Our attempt to create a structure that supported the work of our contributors almost destroyed the spontaneous and chaotic energy that had allowed us to be creative and innovative until then.

Clearly ahead of its time, the OuiShare handbook nevertheless created an important foundation of our current governance principles (we just established a new handbook a few months ago). Though we were probably right that OuiShare needed more structure at the time, we were trying to design a-priori. We had moved too far towards order on the chaos-order scale, too quickly.

“The best-run companies survive because they operate at the edge of chaos.” — Burnes, Bernard, in Complexity Theories and Organizational Change

The experience of the OuiShare organization design really changed my mindset fromseeing chaos as something that needs to be eliminated under all circumstances, to a valuable resource. Like an engine blowing particles around when they get too static, the right level of chaos at the right time, can provide a fertile ground for behaviors to emerge organically.

To foster chaos in a productive way (which basically means becoming a complex adaptive system) in a world that demands a certain level of structure and bureaucracy, there are two elements that strike me as crucial and in need of further development.

Leadership to navigate a murky ocean

As I talked about in my last post, the nature of leadership is changing. In emergent organizations, leaders need a different skillset. While anyone working in an organization like OuiShare needs to have a high tolerance for chaos, there are a few things I have observed that leaders specifically need to be good at.

Firstly, recognize the positive energizing quality of chaos and then treat it as a resource in need of protection. However, it’s not only about fostering chaos, it’s about balance.

A new challenge for leaders is to enable chaos and order to co-exist in their organization.

To get things done, leaders can help create ‘spaces of clarity’ by pulling together resources in the organization to create a tangible action. I like to think of these spaces as islands in the middle of a wild, chaotic ocean. If OuiShare were the ocean, the individual projects such as a OuiShare Fest, a POC21, a research exploration would be the islands.

Project leaders are crystalizers that facilitate and hold space for a team to have a high level of focus and clarity in the midst of an ocean. Following the notion of sense and respond, they observe behaviors and then create the minimal necessary structures to support them. Like this, the role of OuiShare Connectors was created in a response to an emerging behavior of people taking on ambassador like activities by coordinating local communities.

Scaffolds that support emergence

The second crucial element that I think needs more development in a new world of work are the minimum viable structures for emergent organizations.

This includes both structures for internal organizing such as tools for communication, project management and collaborative decision-making, but also infrastructures that can act as intermediaries between more chaotic spaces and the real world. Opencollective is a great example of such an infrastructure.

They make it easy for loosely organized groups to grow and receive funds in a very lean way, by letting them operate through Opencollective’s legal “host” entity (instead of having to create their own). Encode and various new dynamic equity tools are creating structures to make it easier for holocratic and self-managed organizations to comply with legal structures and processes.

These are great starting points, but we still have such a long way to go. Organizations like OuiShare and Enspiral are trying to operate across borders and sectors, as well as outside of binary non-profit / for-profit categories, and the more we grow, the larger the pressure becomes to replace chaos with orderto conform with the administrative and legal requirements of the various countries we operate in.

The more an organization grows, the larger the pressure to replace chaos with order

The question I have been asking myself is whether it is just a matter of time until the chaos has to end.Is this just another classic story of a new organization that goes from from its early innovative and agile phase to becoming rigid, slow and institutionalized?Or will we be able to resist the pressure and enable a different generation of organizations to thrive?

Because I believe the latter, I have decided to dedicate more of my time to join those building infrastructures for emergent, collaborative ways of working at scale. With my team at Greaterthan, we’re working in the area of infrastructures and practices for collaboration around finance, starting with the development of the collaborative budgeting tool Cobudget.

More coming soon about how my experience in OuiShare has led me to work more on collaborative finance.

To learn more about the inside of an emergent organization, go to opensource.ouishare.net. If you’re interested in applying these concepts to your organization, check out OuiShare’s services on rethink-remix.ouishare.net.

These thoughts are based on my personal anecdotal experience, not academic research. Though I am not an expert on it, research on how complex adaptive systems can be applied to organizational theory appear to be a fruitful line of further inquiry on this topic.

A special thanks to my editor, Bianca Pick.

Photo credits: Davidaltabev (1); MassiveKontent (2); wwarby (3)

Thanks to Kate Beecroft and Susan Basterfield.

Originally published on Medium.com

The post Maximum viable chaos: a recipe for emerging organizations appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As a more recent Enspiral member based in Europe, they asked me to write about the larger landscape I saw a network such as Enspiral being part of. I had gotten to know this space quite well and from a different perspective, by being in the midst of the global Ouishare community since 2012. I liked the prompt, and said yes.

A global movement with no name

My essay in Better Work Together, Welcome to the age of participation, puts forward a question: are organizations like Enspiral and Ouishare isolated phenomena, or are they part of a larger, emerging movement? If this is a movement, what are its characteristics? What are the key themes and commonalities? Who is part of it? What could be its’ impact on the world?

In reflecting on my experiences over the past 8 years in various countries, communities and (many) gatherings, the conclusion I reach is no — these are not isolated phenomena. They are part of a growing movement. This left me with a challenge: how do I describe a movement that my intuition tells me exists, but that has no name or quantitative measure? In my essay, I put words to my experiences to draw out the common patterns and themes I can see.

There is a movement on the rise that it is leveraging the power of community, networks, and participation to work on systemic challenges.

Here is how I describe this global movement: a movement that it is leveraging technology and the power of community to connect local and global action and form networks to work on systemic challenges. This not only exists conceptually, but is a tangible reality with a growing number of projects scattered across the globe. The organizations that are part of it come from a broad range of sectors — from environment, to agriculture, to education, to health, to business, to politics. This diversity makes it harder for them to recognize each other. Yet, while their areas of work may differ, their modes of operating are similar. They are aware that their work is a contribution — not a complete solution — to the challenge they aim to solve, and that it is a piece in a much larger puzzle (of global wicked problems).

To understand the facets of this movement more clearly, I identified five main fields (not the only ones) it spans across:

1. The Sharing & Collaborative Economy
2. Circular Economy & Ecological Activism
3. Social Entrepreneurship & Impact
4. Open Source & Decentralization
5. Digital Nomadism & Freelancer collectives

As broad and different as these fields may seem, many of the people and organizations working in them share an ethos, a culture, and many common values. In my essay I paint a colorful picture of this culture and those who are championing it.

Its’ stars are not famous figureheads, but the communities as a whole.

Here is a snapshot of some of the organizations I alone have encountered throughout my work, whom I see as part of this culture (and which are mentioned as examples in the book):

Amanitas Collective, B-Corp, Civic Wise, Commons Network, Edmund Hillary Fellowship, Fab City, Holochain, Impact Hub Network, MakeSense, Malt, Open Collective, Open Food Network, Ouishare, Platform Coop, P2P Foundation, Remotive, Scuttlebut, Shareable, Transition Towns Network, Wemind, Zero Waste Network.

And there are so many more.

Moving from connecting to collective action

This movement has matured a lot since I entered it in 2011, from a fuzzy niche to gradually becoming more defined. The level of connections between the people and organizations within this ecosystem has been increasing, but that is just the first step.

We can all be different and united in action.

Cross-community initiatives like Neotribes, Human Networks, and Dgov Foundation are demonstrating the value of working beyond your own community and networking the networks. Now it’s time we use the fabric we have been weaving between us to move from connecting to collective action. If this movement is to achieve the impact the world needs right now, we need to recognize: we can all be different while united in action.

Read the full essay in Enspiral’s first book, Better Work Together!

Better Work Together reflects on 7+ years of learnings from the Enspiral community through short essays, practical guides, toolkits and personal reflections. It covers different facets of the future of work, including self management, collective structures, cultural processes and tools to deliver a global perspective on how embracing new ways of working together can transform how we do businesses — with practical examples from real world learning.

If you liked this article, I appreciate your claps, following me on Medium and twitter.

Follow the organizations mentioned above on Medium: OpenCollectiveHolochain Design OpenFoodFrance B Corporation B Lab UK BCorpSpainRemotive Malt Shareable TransitionTown Media Fab City Global InitiativeImpact Hub makesense

Thank you Kate Beecroft for the edits and Joshua Vial for the title inspiration!Some rights reserved

The post Better Work Together: Reflections from a nascent movement appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The post A rebellious hope appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens: Dear Nathan, this is not your first book. Could you give our readers a short overview of your “life in books”, i.e. how each subsequent book is linked to the other, eventually leading to the insights and motivations that resulted in your new book on the future of the cooperative tradition ?

Nathan Schneider: It does seem like a rather baffling path. First, a book on arguments about God, then a close-up on Occupy Wall Street, and now co-ops. But it all makes sense in my head somehow. The overriding challenge for me has always been that of capturing how people bring their highest ambitions into the realities of the world. I’m drawn to people with both adventuresome imaginations and the audacity to put them into practice.

This book followed especially naturally from the Occupy one, Thank You, Anarchy. After the protests died down in 2012 and 2013, I started noticing that some of the activists I’d been following got involved in cooperative businesses. The first business I know of that started at Occupy Wall Street was a worker co-op print shop. Other people were helping create co-ops in areas of New York hit by Hurricane Sandy. There was this euphoria about the idea of co-ops among many of these people—a way of earning a livelihood while retaining the democratic values of the protests. I experienced a bit of that euphoria myself, which turned to a more serious fascination as I realized how long and deep this cooperative tradition has been.

MB: Can you tell us about the evolution of your engagement with Platform Cooperativism?

NS: Pretty early on in this work, I started seeing opportunities for cooperatives in tech. I’ve long been a tinkerer with free software and open source, so I’d been used to thinking of technology as a kind of commons. But this came to a head around 2014, when more and more people were wising up to the fact that Silicon Valley’s so-called “sharing economy”—which was then becoming mainstream—really didn’t have much to do with sharing. Especially under the guidance of the OuiShare network based in Paris, Neal Gorenflo of Shareable, and of course the P2P Foundation, I started noticing that a few entrepreneur-activists were trying to figure out a real sharing economy, with sharing built into the companies themselves. This was a hack open-source software was missing; those people had hacked intellectual property law but they’d left the extractive, investor-controlled corporation unscathed. Now it was time to rethink the logic of companies, and the old cooperative tradition seemed like a sensible place to start.

In late 2014 I teamed up with Trebor Scholz, who had been thinking along similar lines, and the following year we organized the first platform co-op conference at the New School in New York. The response was way beyond what we had expected, and we had the germ of a movement in our midst. The more I was getting approached by new startups trying to create platform co-ops, the more I found myself turning to history in order to be able to offer advice based on some kind of evidence. The more I did that, the more I discovered how much there is to learn and to draw from.

MB: How do you see the relations between cooperativism and the commons? Could they possibly merge?

NS: I regard cooperatives as a kind of commons, a mode of commoning that has made itself legible to the industrial-era state and market. Compared to the visions of many commons activists today, however, the co-op tradition is quite conservative. I like its conservatism; it makes for fewer wheels in need of simultaneous reinvention. As a storyteller, I find it can be hard to tell stories about the more cutting-edge commoners because the challenges they are taking on are so hard, and so new, that people who lack an ideological commitment aren’t going to stick around for long. Cooperatives are a way of introducing people to a radical vision of the commons that also includes familiar stuff like Visa, Associated Press, and the credit union down the street. But I wouldn’t claim cooperatives are sufficient. They’re a starting point, a gateway to more diverse and widespread commoning.

Another concern: Cooperatives are all about old-fashioned property and ownership. I’m sympathetic to the “property is theft” vein of anarchism, but I also think it’s a mistake for commoners to relinquish ownership before the lords do—as the sharing economy proposed. That’s feudalism. Open-source software developers relinquished ownership over the code for Linux, and now it powers history’s most effective corporate surveillance tool, the Android operating system. As Piketty demonstrates, capital ownership (more than wage income) is the driving force behind economic inequality. The cooperative tradition is a way of distributing ownership more equitably. That will put us in a better position to shift toward a world in which property is less important and we can meet more of our needs through the commons. Commoners need to claim their rights from a position of strength.

MB: One of your chapters reviews the experience of one of your interviewers and the FLOK Society project in Ecuador. What is your evaluation of that experience?

NS: The experience of FLOK, which was an effort to craft a country-sized commons transition, was very instructive for me. It was a chance to see commoning presented as a comprehensive social vision, not just as a series of isolated interventions. Cooperatives were a critical ingredient in all that, of course. And of course, too, the Ecuadorian government’s follow-through was very limited. But that process led to the Commons Transition resources, which have been invaluable for articulating in a comprehensive way what all this is about. For me it was a magnificent education. Everyone should have that experience once in a while—to participate in crafting a plan for the future of the world.

MB: Your engagement is strongly linked to your faith. How can one be a progressive Christian in this day and age?  Do you link to particular elements in that tradition?

NS: The more I got to know the cooperative tradition, the more I found it to be bound together with religious traditions. I saw this especially in my own Catholic tradition, which produced such examples as the North American cooperative banks and the great Mondragon worker cooperatives, but similar examples can be found in so many other faiths as well. I wouldn’t say that cooperation is in any way reducible to religion or dependent on it, but as with so many other major forces in our world, religion plays a vital and mysterious role.

I was personally grateful to discover, through this work, some new patron saints. For instance, Clare of Assisi, co-founder of the Franciscan order, insisted in the Middle Ages that her nuns should have the right to self-govern, and that all voices should be heard. John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic economist in the early 20th century United States, wrote beautifully about the moral education that comes through cooperative business. Albert J. McKnight, also a priest, brought a Pan-Africanist vision to the development of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And those of us trapped in English are in dire need of more translations from the work of José María Arizmendiarrieta, the half-blind priest who founded the Mondragon co-ops. Each of these people turned to cooperative economics out of a deep-rooted faith that God has endowed each of us with the dignity to be capable and deserving of co-governing our communities.

MB: How do you see the coming ‘phase transition’ unfold? How optimistic are you that humanity can pull this through?

NS: I’m not big on predictions, despite the subtitle of the book. But what I do know is that, if we decide we want to practice democracy in richer ways than most of us do now, we’re capable of it. The past makes that clear enough. It’s perfectly possible that someday we’ll look back and laugh at the current condition of vast inequalities and autocratic corporations and the occasional ballot box. But at present it seems just as likely that we’ll give up on democracy entirely as that we’ll opt for ever more excellent forms of it.

The following excerpt is republished from Everything for Everyone, by Nathan Schneider:

Phase Transition

Commonwealth

The first time I saw it, I took the metaphor literally. “We will all meet in Quito for a ‘crater-​like summit,’“ the website said. “We will ascend the sides of the volcano together in order to go down to the crater and work.” Alongside those words was a picture of Quilotoa, a caldera in the Ecuadorian Andes where a blue-​green lake has accumulated in the hole left by a cataclysmic eruption seven hundred years ago, enclosed by the volcano’s two-​mile-​wide rim.

What the website beckoned visitors to was something less geologically spectacular than Quilotoa, but possibly earth-​shaking in its own right. The government of Ecuador had sponsored a project to develop policies for a new kind of economy, one based on concepts more familiar in hackerspaces and startups than in legislatures. The project was called FLOK Society—free, libre, open knowledge. Its climactic event, which took place in May 2014, was called a summit, but the nod to Quilotoa’s crater was a way of saying this wasn’t the usual top-​down policy meeting. Nor were the people behind it the usual policymakers.

Michel Bauwens, the fifty-​six-​year-​old leader of the FLOK Society research team, held no PhD, nor experience in government, nor steady job, nor health insurance. A native of Belgium, he lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife and their two children, except when he left on long speaking tours. He dressed simply—a T‑shirt to the first day of the summit, then a striped tie the day of his big address. His graying hair was cropped close around his bald crown like a monk’s. He spoke softly; people around him tended to listen closely. The Spanish hacktivists and Ecuadorian bureaucrats who dreamed up FLOK chose for their policy adviser an unemployed commoner.

If Ecuador was to leapfrog ahead of the global hegemons, it would need a subversive strategy. “It’s precisely because the rest of the world is tending toward greater restrictions around knowledge that we have to figure out ways of producing that don’t fall within the confines of these predominant models,” Ecuador’s minister of education, science, technology, and innovation, Rene Ramirez, told me. He and other government officials were talking about dispensing with such strictures as copyright, patents, and corporate hierarchies. “We are essentially pioneers in this endeavor. We’re breaking new ground.”

At first this was a subversion mutually beneficial to guests and hosts alike. Several months before the summit, Bauwens said that FLOK was a “sideways hack” — of the country, maybe even of the global economy. “It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth.

FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador’s brand at the time. The president, Rafael Correa, sometimes spoke in favor of open-​source software; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012. Even while exploiting rain-​forest oil resources and silencing dissenters, Correa’s administration called for changing the country’s “productive matrix” from reliance on finite resources in the ground to the infinite possibilities of unfettered information. Yet most of the North Americans I met in Quito were out of a job because Correa had recently outlawed foreign organizations, likely for circulating inconvenient information about human rights.

As the summit approached, local politicians seemed to evade Bauwens and the team of researchers he’d brought there. Team members weren’t paid on time. Two dozen workshops about open knowledge took place across the country, with mixed response. By the time I met Bauwens in the gaudy apartment he was renting in Quito, a few days before the summit began, he looked exhausted from infighting with the Spaniards and wresting his staff‘s salaries from the government. “It’s going to be a much harder fight than I anticipated,” he said.

Bauwens had a knack for seeking out potent knowledge. He grew up in Belgium as the only child of two orphan parents. His curiosities drifted from Marxism as a teenager to, as an adult, various Californian spiritualities, which led him to Asian ones, then esoteric sects like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Meanwhile, Bauwens put his cravings to work in business. He worked as an analyst for British Petroleum and then, in the early 1990s, started a magazine that helped introduce Flemish readers to the promise of the internet. As an executive at Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, he guided its entry into the online world by acquiring startups. And then, in 2002, he’d had enough. He quit, then moved with his second wife to her family’s home in Chiang Mai.

“Capitalism is a paradoxical system, where even the ruling class has a crappy life,” he says. He started to believe his unhappiness had cataclysmic causes.

For two years in Thailand, Bauwens read history. He studied the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism—a ”phase transition,” as he puts it. It was an age when the previous civilization was in crisis, and he concluded that what led the way forward was a shift in the primary modes of production. The Roman slave system collapsed, and then networks of monasteries spread innovations across Europe, helping to sow the seeds of the new order. What emerged was an interplay of craft guilds organizing free cities, warlords ruling from behind castle walls, and peasants living off common land. As the feudal system grew top-​heavy, networks of merchants prepared the way for the commercial, industrial reordering that followed.

With the internet’s networks, he came to believe that industrial civilization faced a crisis of comparable import, as well as the germ of what could come next. He zeroed in on the notion of commons-​based peer production— the modes by which online networks enable people to create and share horizontally, not as bosses and employees but as equals. It was a new rendition of the old medieval commons, but poised to become the dominant paradigm, not just a means of survival at the peripheries. He set out to find examples of where this world-​transformation was already taking place. By seeking, he found.

The bulk of Bauwens’ oeuvre lives on the collaborative wiki that long served as the website of his Foundation for Peer‑to‑Peer Alternatives—the P2P Foundation, for short. Its more than thirty thousand pages, which he has compiled with more than two thousand online coauthors, include material on topics from crowdsourcing to distributed energy to virtual currencies. His life’s work takes the form of a commons.

Bauwens tends to talk about his vision in the communal “we,” speaking not just for himself but for a movement in formation. He borrows a lot of the terms he relies on from others, then slyly fits them into a grander scheme than the originators envisioned. Put another way: “I steal from everyone.” Nevertheless, one is hard-​pressed to locate any enemies; rather than denouncing others, he tends to figure out a place for them somewhere in his system.

It was in and for Ecuador, together with his team, that Bauwens mapped out the next world-​historical phase transition for the first time. He believes that cooperatives are the event horizon. They’re bubbles of peer‑to‑peer potential that can persist within capitalism, and they can help the coming transition proceed.

They can decentralize production through local makerspaces while continually improving a common stock of open-​source designs. They can practice open-​book accounting to harmonize their supply chains and reduce carbon emissions. Open intellectual-​property licenses can help them share their resources for mutual benefit. As these networks grow, so will the commons they build, which will take over roles now played by government and private markets. Soon all the free-​flowing information, combined with co‑op businesses, will turn the economy into a great big Wikipedia or Linux—by anyone, for anyone. The industrial firm, whether capitalist or cooperative, will dissolve into collaborations among peers. Bauwens calls this process “cooperative accumulation.”

Co‑ops are not an end in themselves. They’re not the destination. But they’re the passageway to a peer‑to‑peer commons. “We see it as the strategic sector,” he told me. New cooperative experiments were spreading from Mississippi to Syria, and here was a chance to show how they could grow to the scale of an entire country.

The Quito convention center is a two-​story complex with stately white columns and hallways enclosed in walls of glass. Visible just a few blocks away is the National Congress building, the supposed destination of FLOK Society’s proposals. Volcanoes stand in the distance behind it, the city rising up as high on their slopes as it can manage. During the four days of the “Good Knowledge Summit,” as the event was called, bureaucrats in business casual worked alongside hackers in T‑shirts to develop and distill the discussions into policy.

The opening night included bold pronouncements. “This is not just an abstract dream,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of knowledge and human talent. “Many of the things we talk about these days will become a reality.” Rather than tax havens, added the subsecretary of science, technology, and innovation, Rina Pazos, “we need to establish havens of open and common knowledge.”

Bauwens spent most of his time in the sessions on policies for cooperatives. In Ecuador, as in many places, it is harder to start a co‑op than a private company. The Canadian co‑op expert John Restakis, a member of Bauwens’s research team, called on Ecuadorian officials to loosen the regulations and reporting requirements on co‑ops, and to enable more flexible, multi-stakeholder structures. The officials pushed back; the regulations were there for a reason, after waves of co‑op failures and abuses. Restakis and Bauwens pressed on. They wanted Ecuador’s government to serve as what they called a “partner state,” nurturing commons-​oriented activities without seeking to direct or control them.

By the summit’s end, the working groups had amassed a set of proposals, some more developed than others: wiki textbooks and free software in schools, open government data, new licenses for indigenous knowledge, community seed banks, a decentralized university. Mario Andino, the newly elected governor of Sigchos, one of Ecuador’s poorer regions, wanted to develop open-​source farm tools for difficult hillside terrain. Before the summit, Bauwens visited Sigchos and received a standing ovation for his presentation. “We could be a model community,” Andino said. But there were no promises.

Over the course of his life, Plato made several journeys from Athens to Syracuse, in Sicily, with the hope of making it a model of the kind of society he described in his Republic. The rulers there, however, fell far short of being the philosopher-​kings he needed; he returned home to retire and compose a more cynical kind of political theory. If not quite so discouraged, Bauwens seemed adrift after the summit ended. The work of FLOK Society was now in the hands of the Ecuadorians, and by that time, there was little indication the government would take more from the whole effort than a publicity stunt. Bauwens was already starting to look toward the next iteration; thanks in part to the process in Ecuador, there were signs of interest from people in Spain, Greece, Brazil, Italy, and Seattle. The same month as the summit, Cooperation Jackson held its Jackson Rising conference.

“Recognition by a nation-​state brings the whole idea of the commons to a new level,” Bauwens said. “We have to abandon the idea, though, that we can hack a country. A country and its people are not an executable program.”

Excerpted from Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Photo by thisisbossi

The post Everything for everyone: Michel Bauwens interviews Nathan Schneider appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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

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

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

Table 1: Desirable approach for risk and care management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table 4: Approach to Platform Decisions

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

• Opening, opening, opening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• It should organize the consultations to stakeholders.

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

• It should serve as arbitrator of stakeholders’ disputes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the following canvases:

• The Ecoopsystem Idea Tester (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Exploration (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Sustainability Matrix (draft)

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

Three problems of Platform Coops

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

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

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

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

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

Although Rochdale is normally credited as the “birthplace of cooperation” records show that in 1761, sixteen weavers in Ayrshire set up “The Society of Weavers in Finnick”, arguably the first co-operative organisation of the industrial age. It was some 83 years later, in 1844 that the infamous Rochdale Pioneers opened their store in Toad Lane, Rochdale and devised the principles which became the model for cooperatives worldwide.

Regardless of the dates, both groups had the same objectives, and the Fenwick charter required members to be “honest and faithful to one another … and to make good and sufficient work and exact neither higher nor lower prices than are accustomed in the towns and parishes of the neighbourhood”.

Fenwick survived on tweed and muslin weaving, shoemaking and farming and its tradesmen depended on patronage by the local elite. The late 1700s were a period of rapid change in the textile industry, with increasing pressure from agents and manufacturers to lower prices. Inspectors were employed to check the quality of work and prices, and it could be disastrous for a village to gain a bad reputation for quality, over-charging, or late delivery.

It does not take much imagination to see the parallels between the pressures placed on the Fenwick weavers and the perils of today’s “gig economy” workers whose livelihoods can be ruined by a few bad ratings and a damaged, digital, reputation.

The weavers’ society began by buying and sharing materials and looms in an effort to reduce operating costs for their members whilst still delivering a quality service. Together they were weaving threads into cloth, creating the materials the nation required for clothing and linen, quite literally weaving the ‘fabric of society’.

Today the term ‘thread’ has taken on another meaning and even the Oxford English Dictionary includes a second definition, after sewing and weaving, citing a thread as “a group of linked messages posted on an Internet forum that share a common subject or theme” and it is here, in this new digital domain, that a renewed essence of cooperation is emerging.

As the body of collective knowledge available via the internet, and technological developments, expand exponentially delivering unforeseen changes to the fabric of todays societies, the digital threads of collaboration are being teased out, untangled and woven into something better by a new type of co-operative weaver.

The internet has spawned a myriad of collaborative projects, the most notable of which are still Wikipedia, Firefox and Linux itself – the open source kernel which supports majority of the internet – but, in general, effective large-scale online collaboration has been extremely slow to evolve. Instead we are presented with a cacophony of voices all vying for our waning attention and, despite our best efforts, we naturally gravitate into internet silos which hamper the cross-pollination of ideas and opinions. Plus, now publishing one’s ideas has become so easy, there is often huge overlap between disparate groups who share exactly the same vision, purpose and objectives but remain ignorant of each others’ existence, or unsure how they could collaborate when they do discover each other.

This is the realm in which  The Collaborative Technology Alliance highlights the objective: “There are many groups around the world working to deliver a more open, more collaborative and inclusive society. These groups are intention-aligned but remain disparate initiatives, which means they fail to benefit from the network effect”.

Imagine how much more effective we could be if the members of the Transition Network, NEON, Occupy, The Solidarity Economy, The Internet of Ownership, The WWOOFers, The Eco village Network and all the other hundreds and thousands of like-minded networks were actively collaborating on creating the type of society to which they all aspire. The network effect would be unstoppable.

The good news is that there are people working on uniting these groups and they are the new co-op weavers: People like Nathan Schneider and Trebor Scholtz from the Platform Cooperativism movement, Michel Bauwens and all his excellent collaborators at the Peer to Peer Foundation, Fransesca Pick and her fellow connectors at OuiShare, Arthur Brock and the other boffins behind Holo (the new alternative to blockchain), and Pia Mancini and the other hackers and makers behind Democracy.earth. These are just some of the people that are using the warp and the weft of the world wide web to to weave a new fabric for our society; A fabric woven from the cooperative spirit which has been missing from our world for too long. We are extremely proud to be hosting most of the above names, as well as a hundreds of other would-be-weavers to the second Platform Co-op conference, OPEN 2018, which will take place in London in July.

Once the original Fenwick weavers got together in 1761 it was not long before they branched out into food and “victuals” by buying a sack of oatmeal at wholesale to sell to their members in smaller quantities at cut prices. Very soon they began lending money to needy members and their families making the Fenwick Society the first recorded credit union in the world. The story in Rochdale was very similar. The Pioneers decided it was time shoppers were treated with honesty, openness and respect, that they should be able to share in the profits that their custom contributed to and that they should have a democratic right to have a say in the business. Every customer of the shop became a member and so had a true stake in the business. When you think about it like that, and what transpired as a result of those pioneers, we would do well to recognise the new co-operative weavers of today and to assist them in every way we can.

Come to OPEN 2018 on the 26th & 27th of July to meet many of the people named above and help co-create a cooperative future.

Photo by cobalt123

The post Who are the new Co-op weavers? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Andreas Arnold: Germany’s capital city Berlin has a thriving sharing and collaborative economy, thanks in part to think-and-do tank OuiShare. Since 2012, the group has facilitated a lively exchange of dialogue and action in many different formats, which has led to a strongly connected network of over 200 different projects and more than 1,000 individuals. In 2014, a group of sharing experts launched SharingBerlin and took the community building efforts to a whole new level. For two years, an exhibition and networking event called Share Fair (2014, 2015) brought together around 65 important players from the scene. After mapping Berlin’s collaborative economy ecosystem, the group started to engage with local politicians and the government to create an official Sharing City. While this hasn’t panned out yet, sharing projects continue to flourish in Berlin. Even without the official recognition of Berlin as a Sharing City, projects have been flourishing in the fields of food, mobility, money, and more.

1. Food

Mundraub (“theft of food”) is the largest online platform for the discovery of foraged food. It allows people to map locations, connect with others, and create actions to pick free fruits and vegetables. The group also organizes a harvest and offers plant care and other activities. Meanwhile, the organization Foodsharing offers tools for people to share leftover food. Another community food initiative is AufHaxe. The group’s mission is to encourage “cooking and partying in your neighborhood.” People are split into teams, and each team can choose to prepare an appetizer, a main dish, or a dessert, and invite another team over for one course. After each course, the teams split up and move to another team member’s home for the next course. At the end of the day, each team member eats three courses (each one at a different house), connects with 12 people, and participates in a huge party with all the members. Some of the food prepared at these cooking events come from FoodAssembly, a platform that connects organic farmers and buyers at local markets.

Photo of community harvest courtesy of mundraub

2. Mobility

The P2P cargo bike-sharing platform Velogistics is a community treasure. It facilitates a commons-based culture of sustainability and DIY by connecting borrowers and lenders who want to share cargo bikes, usually for free. The founders of the platform also maintain Werkstatt Lastenrad (“workshop cargo bike”), a site with information on DIY building and repairing of cargo bikes. Workshops like Regenbogenfabrik (“rainbow factory”) and local bike stores offer donation-based repair sets and knowledge for self-service. If you need to borrow a bike, you can choose between the free bike sharing group BikeSurf or other bike rentals like Call a Bike and nextbike.

Photo of a cargo bike ride along the old airfield of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin, courtesy of Andrea Künstle/velogistics.net

3. Item Sharing

The LEIHBAR (meaning “rentable”) runs a library of things, via a digital platform. It offers a network of pickup stations (mainly 24/7 convenience stores, community gardens) and provides users  convenient and time-saving access to items of daily use. Drills, projectors, tents, and many other items can be rented via the website for a small fee, making the user experience comparable to professional car sharing. The project’s social impact lies in its system design for circular economy. Partnering with tool producers (ex. Bosch), LEIHBAR convinces sales-orientated companies of circular business models and incentivizes longer product life times, reparability, and modular design. The longer the products last and the better they can be repaired, the lesser the toll on the environment.

Photo of item delivery, lending locker, and pick-up station at an urban garden, courtesy of LEIHBAR

The community-based sharing store concept LEILA has already become well-known worldwide and has inspired at least 10 other cities to launch similar projects. Members of the community donate and share items that can be borrowed by others. To ease drop-off and pick-up, the store established a reliable infrastructure run by its members. Users who cannot find a desired item via this channel still have a chance to browse the local P2P platform Fairleihen.

4. Work

At the cooperative CZY WRK, digital workers, freelancers, and artists are welcome to share mutual work assignments, profits, and certain securities to overcome down-periods. The group believes strengthening its network will benefit all participating individuals.

Closely entangled with CZY WRK is the coworking space SUPERMARKT, which is recognized as one of the key players of the German platform cooperative movement. The group’s conferences and workshops like “Co-op Futures” (June 2017), “Platform Co-ops — Start your own!” (Dec. 2016), and “Community Value” (Sept. 2016) regularly bring together local and international influencers. Another flagship in the Berlin coworking scene is Betahaus (meaning “beta house”). Established in 2009, it offers various rooms, event spaces, and woodworking facilities, where a lively maker community found its origins. Still quite new, the Agora community’s spin-off CRCL hosts a coworking space and a community garden.

5. Money

The nonprofit organization Mein Grundeinkommen (“my universal basic income”) raffles off unconditional basic incomes of 1.000 €/month. Each person who wins receives a monthly transfer for the duration of one year, so 12.000 € in total. The team is interested in finding out what happens, if a society has the financial resources to focus on life-goals rather than on just basic needs. As of now the project has fulfilled the dreams of 105 universal basic income winners who are eating more healthy food, able to afford education, travel, and save.

Photo of the Mein Grundeinkommen team, courtesy of Christian Stollwerk

6. Communities

Das Baumhaus (“The treehouse”) is an open socio-cultural project connecting, inspiring, and empowering its members and local changemakers working for transition to sustainability. The project space was crowdfunded and collaboratively developed by more than 300 people of the community. Nowadays the team fosters the community with regular cooking sessions, concerts, workshops, and other events like the yearly Emergent Berlin gathering.

Photos of the space, community dinner, and concert, courtesy of Das Baumhaus

Another excellent example for a thriving community in Berlin is Prinzessinnengarten (“princess garden”). After occupying some wasteland in the center of the city in 2009, the group — along with friends, activists, and neighbors — cleared away rubbish, built transportable organic vegetable plots, and reaped the first fruits of their labor. Thanks to the openness and entrepreneurial skills of the team, the urban garden gives room to a self-managed, cozy restaurant underneath the trees. The restaurant is supplied by vegetables and herbs grown in the garden. There’s also a nursery, beekeeping area, repair workshops, flea markets, and an access point to pick up LEIHBAR items. It also features several spin-offs like Material Mafia, a recycling project for construction material.

Photos of Prinzessinnengarten: community gardening, nursery and plant sale, neighborhood event, courtesy of Marco Clausen 

7. Bottom-up mass movements

Driven by its own bottom-up community building over the last couple of years, Jolocom focuses on establishing private key applications that allow users to connect to online networks and manage private data to be shared with the platform at the same time. The principle of “own your data” is maintained on a blockchain. Similarly Resonate is a blockchain-based service for streaming music that is cooperatively owned by the people who make it great: musicians, fans, and developers. Both examples show how network value can be distributed among the community to generate new benefits like privacy, cost-effective access for users, and fair payments for producers.

Photo of demonstration for safer bicycle lanes courtesy of press archive Volksentscheid Fahrrad

The list of interesting projects could go on and on, because the collaborative ecosystem draws its power from people who question the status quo. This practice is not just common for the sharing movement, but for general bottom-up cases in Berlin. It explains why Volksentscheid Fahrrad (meaning “referendum bicycle”), the civil society’s answer to the mobility and bicycle policy of the city administration, has been very successful. The campaign has received 100,000 signatures from bicycle enthusiasts who are demanding better bicycle lanes, bicycle parking spaces, and car-free zones. One step behind, but promising as well is the movement BürgerEnergie Berlin (“civil energy Berlin”) reaching out to purchase the Berlin electricity grid.

Photo of a demonstration for residents to purchase the electricity grid courtesy of BürgerEnergie Berlin

Please visit Berlin and experience our local collaborative economy. I’ll be happy to guide you through the ecosystem.

Header graphic courtesy of Andreas Arnold

The post 7 Reasons Why Berlin is a Successful Sharing City appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Here’s a preview of the program of three days that will be like no other.

Donald Trump’s announcement this June 1st that the United States will be withdrawing from the Paris Accord has caused indignation around the world. On their side of the Atlantic, the fightback was launched by a handful of mayors of big cities, gathered together in an organization called Mayors National Climate Action Agenda. Whatever the mistakes of the White House, they declared, they will work to ensure that within city limits, the fight against global warming will remain a priority. It is city halls, therefore, that will be fulfilling a treaty concluded between nations.

An inconsistent situation some may say. Or could this be a sign of a decisive change to come? Big cities, which already hold substantial demographic, cultural and economic powers, might not be condemned to remain the second order of political actors that they are today. Conversely, in a context of democratic crisis, blurred frontiers, and crumbling Nation-States, our future could well be formed of networked cities that have risen up to the challenge.

THREE DAYS LIKE NO OTHER

As crazy as it may seem, the idea that networks of cities will shape our future is at the heart of the 5th edition of OuiShare Fest Paris. Taking place at the renovated Magasins Généraux in Pantin, this year the event will go far beyond your usual talks, workshops, participative formats and immersive experiences.

Novelties on the menu:

• the Tribunal of Future Generations: can we let robots keep destroying jobs? Should we write the right to laziness in the Constitution? This decision will lay in the hands of the members of the jury, chosen by lottery for this mock trial run by the Magazine Usbek & Rica (Wed, July 5th).
• Masterclasses: in the mornings of the 6th and 7th of July experts from 13 countries will hold 4-hour masterclasses.  Participants can sign up to take a storytelling course with the American publishing consultant Ariane Conrad, learn the A to Z of sharing cities with our Dutch colleagues from ShareNL, or even learn to manage a company without bosses with our New Zealander friends from the Enspiral network. And in the background? Each day is dedicated to a particular dimension of globalized cities
• 3 festive evening events (in comparison to one!)for more opportunities to connect.

DAY 1: REGAINING COLLECTIVE POWER FROM THE BOTTOM-UP

Today, it appears ever more difficult to build consensus at the national level; political identities are fragmenting; politicians are going through a grave crisis of legitimacy. It is at this point that the city can emerge as the stage for a renewal of collective action. From this perspective, it is noteworthy that from New York to Madrid, social movements symbolic of the last few years, have occupied public spaces. Because of its size, among other factors, the city is suitable for experimentation with new forms of participative democracy, fueled by the civic tech revolution.

OuiShare Fest will also welcome two pioneers of citizen technologies: Pia Mancini, co-founder of the platforms DemocracyOS and Open Collective, as well as the Argentine political party Partido de la Red, and Jeremy Heimans, Australian activist and entrepreneur, co-founder of the online petition platform Avaaz and of Purpose, which seeks an in-depth transformation of the very idea of power in connected societies. Alastair Parvin, the creator of the WikiHouse Foundation, which applies the organization methods of the famous online encyclopedia to architecture and design, will be discussing the reinvention of cities by citizens themselves.

And, because it is important to articulate the local and the global, this first day will be concluded with an unusual football match; Pantin vs. the rest of the world!

DAY 2: RETHINKING OUR CITIES AS PLATFORMS

How do we shift from a mass of lonely individuals to an organized and lively ecosystem? Will cities be reborn as platforms for the benefit of their inhabitants? Every local government in the world dreams of replicating Silicon Valley’s success story. But aren’t there other relevant examples to look for, other paths to follow? This topic will be debated between Nicolas Colin (The Family), Jennifer Clamp (Techweek NZ) and Rui Quinta (With Company). Professor and renowned management thinker Anil Gupta (Indian Institute of Management of Ahmedabad) will deliver a talk on what corporate innovators can learn from grassroots movements.

Juan Pablo Ortega (Innotegia, the city of Medellin) and Malik Yakini (Detroit Black Community Food Security Network) will share their stories, which attest to the fact that it is often in cities which went through the worst crises that the drive to innovate is the strongest.

During a “fishbowl” discussion – a OuiShare-favorite hybrid format, somewhere between a business-as-usual conference and a participatory workshop – participants will be invited to reflect on how local authorities can efficiently regulate global collaborative platforms.

DAY 3: BUILDING GLOBAL URBAN NETWORKS

Cities with more power and autonomy should by no mean be mistaken for a temptation to retreat. There is no point arguing with the fact that there is already a chasm between globalized metropolitan and peripheral areas. But how do we prevent it from widening?

To echo Mark Watts’ (Executive Director of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group) opening talk, day 3 will be all about global urban networks. Founder of the Fab City Global Initiative Tomas Diez will share his vision for a future of locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. Dylan Hendricks (Ten-Year Forecast) will talk about the Internet of cities and the future of borders in the post-Brexit Europe. Another must-attend session: a discussion with the creators of the Darwin Ecosystem and Ateliers La Mouche about the role of alternative spaces in urban revitalization.

And to conclude this Fest in due form, you are warmly invited to a genuine Brazilian Festival on the banks of the Canal de l’Ourcq!

Don’t miss out on this one and explore the full program

Get your ticket at http://paris.ouisharefest.com

The post OuiShare Fest Paris: Cities of the World, Unite! appeared first on P2P Foundation.