Another milestone has been reached in our quest to build a new kind of trading system for the UK. We’ve now completed our first trading loop, which involved Lowimpact.org, Community Regen and Outlandish, two of which are co-operatives.

Here’s what Paul, of Community Regen, said about the trade:

I can see transactions that don’t involve money becoming very attractive for small businesses, who often have problems with cashflow. I have a small business that is all about connecting and networking with other organisations and businesses, and mutual credit is all about connecting and providing mutual support, so it feels very natural to me – very rewarding. I’ve already had deeper conversations with people at Outlandish. It builds trust between participating businesses, which just makes sense to me. It’s a no-brainer, really

And here’s Polly at Outlandish:

It feels great to be right at the start of a network designed to facilitate trade outside of the normal realm of monetary exchange. It’s great that like-minded businesses can be connected in this way, without having to contribute to banks’ profits. Hopefully it will also help us to extend our network of suppliers, and to find suppliers that operate ethically. I found the trade itself really easy.

And here’s Dave of Lowimpact.org:

It works! Three happy trading partners. From our perspective, we’ve started to get good advice from Paul, and we’ve already lined up a second trade with an accountancy firm in which we’ll use mutual credit as part of the payment for producing our annual accounts. We’re already having conversations with businesses that are quite unusual – based on trust, and a desire to build a different kind of world. It feels like a much better way to do business, which makes me believe that there is huge potential here for bringing about wider, beneficial change.

Around 100 businesses have expressed interest in joining The Open Credit Network – everything from farmers, accountants and graphic designers to weavers, IT specialists and printers. Each business has listed some of its ‘offers’ and ‘wants’.

Our job is now to find trading loops between those businesses. Eventually, this will all be automated so that participating businesses can find what they want without having to be part of a ‘loop’.

But for now, we’re initiating trading loops involving 3 or 4 businesses that can trade with each other, to complete a full cycle. Business A provides something for business B, which provides something of the same value for business, C, which provides something of the same value for business A.

We built the required software to run trade accounts for each business, who will be in credit or debit depending on how much they’ve bought from or sold to other members of the network.

Trades can be partly in mutual credit and partly in cash. One credit is equivalent to one pound. Credits can’t be exchanged for for pounds, or vice versa.

In our first trading loop Lowimpact.org provided a banner advertisement for Outlandish, who provided web services for Community Regen, who provided fundraising advice for Lowimpact.org with a trade value of £100, but in credits, rather than cash.

Once a business is a member of the Open Credit Network, trading itself is as simple as logging on to the website and filling out a short form. The admin team then check and approve the trades, one account is credited, the other debited and voilà – the businesses get what they want, without having to come up with scarce cash.

If you’re interested in setting up your business as a Member please fill in the expression of interest form.

Photo by star-one

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Since 2015 Outlandish have spent £192,450 in Cobudget across 34 buckets.

Kate Beecroft interviews Brian Spurding, from the web services coop Outlandish about their use of Cobudget. Originally published in Greater than/finance. 

A web services consultancy based in London, Outlandish is a worker owned cooperative.

They use Cobudget to democratically distribute dividends to all cooperative members as a way to invest in new projects they care about, for example new tech products, social impact projects that need software, match funding of international initiatives.

We talked to Outlander Brian Spurling about how they have been using Cobudget.

How does Cobudgeting work at Outlandish?

At Outlandish the Cobudget process works like this: every quarter, the surplus is distributed proportionally according to the hours that people have spent working for Outlandish. This money goes to everyone’s Cobudget accounts. From there, these funds can be allocated to different ‘buckets’ — buckets are projects that people from Outlandish have proposed.

Anyone who is either a member of the cooperative or close collaborator — called ‘Outlanders‘ — can create proposals for projects to be funded.

Mandatory information for these proposals is the description of the project goals, as well as the people who will be working on the project and the estimated time and money needed for the work. The projects should all in some way or another serve Outlandish’s mission and theyshould not be core expenses or costs of the business.

What have been some of your most funded projects?

Featured amongst the funded projects have been a prototype for the site schoolcuts.org.uk. This site features an interactive infographic to show how your local schools are being de-funded. It turned from a successful Cobudget project into a commercial project in cooperation with the National Union of Teachers and won silver at the digital impact awards 2017.

Another big investment by Outlandish has been Daugher of Social Monitor, a project to develop an existing system into a product offering. With no sales opportunities in the pipeline, this is a great example of how Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.

“Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.” — Brian Spurling

One of our favourite clients (a research organisation fighting corruption in Papua New Guinea) brought us a great project idea. We identified some additional tech we could build — stuff that would be good for them and interesting for us — so we match-funded their budget (£32, 250). This was a huge success.

Screenshot of one of the projects Outlandish funded on Cobudget

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What has changed since you started using Cobudget to spend your surplus?

Before Cobudget, it was easy to spend small amounts of surplus (<£5,000), because an individual member could sign this off themselves. But it was hard to do anything bigger than that because there was no defined framework on how to make those decisions.

“The way Outlandish makes decisions about our surplus has changed dramatically. Pre-Cobudget, there was a lack of transparency and the authority to spend the surplus was limited to the co-ops members.” — Brian Spurling

This could have been defined without using Cobudget, of course. But with Cobudget, not only is the spending of the surplus now transparent, but anybody working at Outlandish can propose projects, and funds can be distributed directly to individuals. It is the combination of these three elements that make it so transformative for how we manage our surplus.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to learn more about the tool Cobudget, read more here.

For further resources and use cases, check out our Guide to Collaborative Finance.

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(13 mins) Josef Davies-Coates – Josef will be speaking about recent exciting platform and digital co-operative activity in the UK, and why the legal framework that exists there could serve platform co-ops particularly well. This will include details on “Community Shares,” a form of democratic (one member, one vote) equity crowdfunding for co-operatives that has existed in the UK since the mid 1800s, but that has been growing exponentially post the 2008 crash (from £2.5m in 2009 to over £20m in 2014). He’ll also update us on the Enspiral-inspired plans to create a UK-wide Co-op of Digital Co-ops being led by London based co-op Outlandish. Finally, he’ll share details of his work with the FairShares Association to help new and existing tech start-ups to become multi-stakeholder co-operatives.

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From the notes to the video:

Nathan Schneider (@nathanairplane) gives an introduction to the concept of platform co-operativism, and talks about what the digital economy can learn from the tradition of co-operatives.

The talk is from the Platform Co-ops events at Newspeak House in May 2016. Hosted by Outlandish (outlandish.com, twitter.com/outlandish)

Look at the Outlandish Youtube channel for the Q&A session as well as other speakers from the event.

Event description:

High-tech tools of exploitation are being repurposed to build a fairer economy.

The digital platforms that have become the connective tissue of our lives – the likes of Airbnb and Google – have proven to tend towards monopolies, monetisation of surveillance and disregard for labour standards.

But what stops us from using the Internet’s power for collective action to usurp them with alternatives?

What if taxi drivers were to seize control of their own platform and run it democratically? And what would an Amazon look like, were it not only to push wares, but to distribute power and accountability?

Outlandish invites you to an evening of discussions on the opportunities and challenges of making the vision of Platform Co-operativism a reality in the UK and abroad.

The post Nomadic platform societies need platform cooperatives 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.

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