(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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(16 mins) Felix Weth — Fairmondo is an online marketplace owned by its users. It is open to professional as well as private sellers, with no general restrictions on what products and services can be offered, except for illegal offers or offers deemed unacceptable by our members. By contrast, through the positive promotion of products that fulfill a set of criteria for “fairness,” Fairmondo makes it easy for users to shop in line with their values. These criteria are constantly open for discussion and improvement by members and the broader user base. Founded in Germany in 2012, Fairmondo is a multi-stakeholder cooperative with open membership for every person who feels affected by its activities. Its statutes include a legally binding commitment to uncompromising transparency and democratic accountability. The managing board is elected by the employees, to ensure a culture of mutual respect within the operating team.

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(12 mins) Silvia Zuur — . At its heart, it’s a group of people who want to co-create an encouraging, diverse community of people trying to make a difference.

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Cities and Technological Sovereignty 6 – The Gig Economy Needs To Meet Its Responsibilities

(13 mins) Wolfgang Kowalsky – The ‘gig economy’ may sound cool but in reality many of the jobs offer a fast route back to the problems faced by day laborers of 100 years ago. The gig economy needs to grow up and meet its responsibilities to workers by turning undeclared work into declared work. Online platforms have the effect, if not the intent, of disguising the employment relationship along with facilitating avoidance of social security and tax obligations. The European Commission must stop giving an alibi for these arrangements. What about fair play? Is there a level playing field between new and old service providers when a 3-star hotel in Spain has to comply with 244 rules whereas “sharing” properties have only 12 rules to deal with? Digitalization‘s false promises for a better world need to be addressed. The future of work must be fair digital work.

Photo by mag3737

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(15 mins) Mayo Fuster Morell – Mayo Fuster Morell will provide a brief overview of public policy making approaches to the sharing economy. Using the example of Barcelona, Mayo will focus on what policymakers can do to support the development of platform co-ops. Fuster will present the robust historical roots of this powerful moment of platform cooperativism in Catalonia. Then, she will introduce the Barcelona City Council’s co-creation experience for policy making and the resulting action plan linked specifically to the sharing economy and the development of platform co-ops in the city.

Photo by werner22brigitte (Pixabay)

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(19 mins) Kristy Milland, TurkerNation — If Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) were a boss, one would guess that it hated its employees. This has driven mTurk workers (Turkers) to fight back in a variety of ways, some of which may be useful to those fighting their own battles in other sectors. From rating customers to writing letters to awakening class consciousness to writing rules about what is ethical customer and platform behaviour, a variety of techniques are being tried in the attempt to make online work more bearable. A good work environment does not have to remain a dream, it can be something we realize together. I will take you from today’s mTurk to what online crowd platforms could be, so we can work together to fix the future of work.

Photo by geralt (Pixabay)

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(14 mins) Darren Sharp – Australia is in the midst of a transition from an extractive economy led by the mining and agricultural sectors, towards a knowledge-based service economy. While digital innovation and startups are lauded for their ability to create jobs and stimulate the new economy, an extractive logic which privileges individual reward over mutual benefit remains dominant. Platform co-operatives provide an ethical bridge to the new economy through collective ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms to keep wealth and decision-making in the hands of value creators. Australia is home to a nascent cooperative platform ecosystem comprised of networks like the Commons Transition Coalition and enterprises including AbilityMate, AnyShare, bHive Bendigo, Geddup, Open Food Network and YLab. These system entrepreneurs and organizations are working in partnership with the communities they serve to bring an equitable and inclusive new economy to life.

Photo by Marko Mikkonen

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(14 Mins) Marisa Morán Jahn, Studio REV — Initiated by artist Marisa Morán Jahn (Studio REV-) with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations, the CareForce is a transmedia, public art project, web series, and mobile studio (the CareForce One) that amplifies the voices of America’s fastest growing workforce, caregivers. The CareForce uses a variety of transmedia tools to communicate the growing movement — from an audio novela app accessible by any kind of phone, dance, legal toolkits, comics, performance, artworks, to film — that employ a high touch, low-tech strategy to appeal to the unconverted, introduce a sense of enfranchisement (digital, institutional, legal), and culture-shift by introducing key memes to dignify a low-wage labor force that has been traditionally invisible. In so doing, the CareForce works in tandem with existing digital resources, platforms, and pipelines to build a movement towards long-term structural change and socio-economic, gender equity.

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Cities and Technological Sovereignty 3 – Barcelona’s Strategy for Technological Sovereignty: Winning Back Technology for the People

(14 mins) Francesca Bria – While the platform economy has a clear potential to generate economic impact, there are several important issues that need to be resolved: first and foremost, around ownership, control and management of personal data. One key reason cities and municipalities have so far failed to foster local data-intensive platforms that can compete with Uber and Airbnb is missing access to raw data. Data has become a key part of the urban infrastructure. It helps make better, quicker, and more empirically sound decisions; it promotes socio-economic development and innovation; it improves public services and empowers citizens. But who should own it? Many technology firms aspire to turn data into a new asset class, the key ingredient of what has been called “surveillance capitalism.” But is this the only option? Can cities embrace a different model that socializes data and encourages new forms of cooperativism and democratic innovation? How can cities help ensure that such data is not locked in corporate silos, but is rather turned into a public good?

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(34 MINS) Yochai Benkler – Democratic capitalism is in crisis. Brexit and the Trump nomination marked victories for xenophobic economic nationalism that would have been unimaginable in these two bastions of free trade, globalization, and liberal pluralism a decade ago. They reflect one trajectory of rebellion against the era of oligarchic capitalism that began in 1973 and crashed on the shoals of the Great Recession. The urgent task of the moment is to define a clear alternative. Platform cooperativism is at the cutting edge of defining that next ideological framework, the set of ideas, institutions, norms, practices, and beliefs that will allow us to understand the present stage of market society and to re-embed markets in social relations in ways that will produce a more egalitarian, open, and politically stable market society. Work on the commons and cooperation, on collaborative and learning organizations, FOSS, peer production, and a broader set of disciplines and practices that have developed over the past twenty years provide the foundations of a more decentralized, self-governed, socially-embedded model of market society. It emphasizes the diversity of motivations, institutions, and organizational forms, it recognizes that power in markets is as endemic as it is in the state, and seeks to construct systems that are resilient to these forms of power and allow their participants to engage in self-governance and continuous experimentation, learning, and adaptation in communities of practice. This emerging view of market society is in direct competition with more technologically-deterministic, still-neoliberal conceptions of how market society will develop in the coming decades as well as the resurgent xenophobic nationalism that challenges the very foundations of open society. .”

Discussion

Trebor Scholz: “Yochai Benkler’s talk, in particular, stood out. In his Saturday-morning lecture, he presented platform cooperativism as an attempt to “build a coherent intellectual framework to offer an alternative to the failed ideology of the past forty years.” He is clear: “platform cooperatives will neither kill nor be killed by investor firms,” but there is sufficient room in the current market situation so that platform co-ops can strive. Benkler, a professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, situates platform cooperativism as a “core location for the development of new ideas in the pursuit of an open social economy.” For those less steeped in social economy studies, the term “social economy” refers to economic activities amongst the community. It is located between the economies of the private and public sectors.

Yochai Benkler begins with an account of two ideological periods in politico-economic history — that of managerial capitalism, beginning around World War II and ending during the inflation crisis of the early 1970s, and that of oligarchical capitalism, the period in which neoliberal thought and the Washington Consensus were central. The actuality of a Washington Consensus represents the claim that there is an optimal organizational form such as the investor-owned firm, which upstarts are then called upon to adopt to succeed “in the teeth of the market.” Benkler foregrounded that, ideologically, the actuality of the Washington Consensus depended on ideas such as the reduction of the economy to the self-motivated individual, the reality of predictable, calculable risk, and the importance of planned, controlled, and ultimately stable ventures. For Benkler, however, the victory of the Trump and Brexit campaigns is indicative of a general collapse of the neoliberal model and thus an opening which will be filled by a new economic understanding. He relates these political wins in part to the inequality caused by the extreme and unmatched extraction of wealth by the top 10% in the U.S. and the UK.

Benkler is skeptical about two particular visions of what might replace neoliberalism. First, there are the likes of Peter Thiel who argue for a new age of techno-libertarianism wherein technological development can run its course unimpeded by the state, with deregulation allowing markets to reward talent and accelerate us into a fully-automated Star Trek economy. Benkler did not name Thiel, but Peter Thiel does illustrate this point in his book Zero to One. Here, he argues that only through deregulation, monopolistic genius can be free to innovate us into a post-scarcity future. Second, there are proponents for what Benkler calls “nudge progressivism,” a return to the managerial capitalism of the mid-20th century, only updated and made more efficient by big data analysis.

For Benkler, these two imaginary successors fail to take into consideration the social embeddedness of systems, which is becoming central to all sorts of academic disciplines including sociology, economics, and management science. This “social embeddedness” indicates that we can no longer reduce the motivations of economic actors to rational self-interest, but must also acknowledge the existence of varying, socially-constructed drives and desires. There is a need to look beyond homo economicus to homo socialis, as Benkler puts it.

What Benkler proposes as an alternative future is a network pragmatism which seizes the space for experimentation. Rather than believing ourselves unfailing, he claims we must embrace our fallibilism, understanding that our success will come not from the perfect execution of a pre-planned attempt, but rather a rapid iteration which utilizes the knowledge generated by our applied inquiries to drive us forward and upward.

He stresses that local communities do know best about their needs if only given the chance for reflection through practical experience: trial and error and trial again. It is, he says, precisely this experience which is denied to these communities when they engage with investor capital, which immediately subjects any attempt to the logic of the “tyranny of the margin,” the need to compete in the market, to maximize profits. To produce flexible organizations which can continually adapt and innovate as circumstances change and our knowledge grows, Benkler suggests that we look to methodologies that have already proved successful. These could include institutional analysis and development framework developed by political economist Elinor Ostrom, as well as tech-sector models like commons-based peer production, free and open source software development, and even lean startup models. One challenge will be to determine how platform co-ops can exist as what Scholz calls “soft enclosures” that insulate populations from economically and politically hostile surroundings while also contributing to the commons. Platform co-ops like Fairmondo and Loconomics Cooperative are already sharing their code base and by-laws.

For Benkler, network pragmatism is fundamentally about the embrace of the diversity of organizational forms. This pursuit of an “organizational bricolage” resonates with our understanding that platform cooperatives are but one practical near-term alternative. They are part of this bricolage of the solidarity economy, the pro-commons movement, and various other successful organizational forms including B-corps, non-profits engaged in economic production, philanthropic LLCs, and, central to our community, platform co-ops.” (http://platform.coop/stories/happy-new-year)

Photo by Creativity103

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