Friends,

This has been a difficult but also consequential year for many of us. Beyond the political chaos, we bore witness to the “Death of Tumblr,” the pushback against Upwork’s time-tracking software, and compelling scholarly analysis of Uber’s role in the labor market. Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify access to the private messages of its users. Elizabeth Warren joined the ranks of those calling for the breakup of tech monopolies, which could open the gates for the formation of new cooperatives.

Supporting economic alternatives to these monopolies, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) in New York City is a hub for advancing the cooperative digital economy. Throughout the past year, I had the opportunity to work with emerging co-ops in this network all over the world. 

These encounters have been deeply inspiring. I noticed six trends: 
– a vast interest in protocolary co-ops, distributed ledger technologies, and open co-ops,

– the emergence of platform co-ops in different forms and sectors across countries (with particular foci, for instance, on digital infrastructure or labor markets),

– a growing number of Ph.D. students taking up this new area of research,

– an intensified focus on antitrust measures against tech monopolies,

– an overall upswing in employee ownership in the U.S.,

– the lingering challenges for scaling, such as insufficient startup funding, the “Crypto crash,” and meaningful distributed governance mechanisms.

Which trends did YOU notice? Please write us at [email protected]

First, a few notes on policy developments. The PCC Policy Team, led by Hal Plotkin, wrote a “New Bill of Rights for American Workers Building Support for Cooperatively-Owned Businesses that are Democratically-Owned and Governed” for U.S. Senator Gillibrand who had solicited legislation to promote platform co-ops on the heels of her Main Street Employee Ownership Act. At a large public event at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Andrea Nahles, the leader of the SPD in Germany, made platform cooperativism part of the party’s political platform inspired by my book Uberworked and Underpaid. Learn more.

Also in 2018, PCC & Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) in Toronto received an economic development grant from Google.org, which helped us to start work on the Platform Co-op Development Kit on July 1, 2018. Don’t take my word for it, read this article in Fast Company.

At Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic on Platform Cooperativism, I started to collaborate with the HLS team hoping to find ways to make the legal side of incorporating a platform co-ops easier. This work will continue in 2019, possibly involving additional partners.

Together with Michelle D’Souza and Dana Ayotte at the IDRC I started to work with an emerging platform co-op at SEWA in Ahmedabad, India.

Colin Clark of the IDRC began the co-design process with CoRise Cooperative, a large group of child care providers in Illinois.

We also started conversations with Cataki, a co-op organizing recycling collectors in Brazil and the social care co-op This Cooperative Life in Australia.

We took first steps toward collaborating with refugee women in Hamburg, Germany.

If you are interested in getting involved with our work on the Kit, please contact us at [email protected].

The PCC will continue to work on the Development Kit in 2019, which will also involve redesigning platform.coop in the spring (get involved here). 

Also in the spring, a PCC researcher will approach all platform co-ops with a survey to compile information on the existing companies in the ecosystem with the purpose of advancing the directory. Please let us know if you are aware of any platform co-op that may not be on our radar just yet. Email [email protected]. We want to hear from you.

Anand Giridharadas’ best-selling book Winner Takes All helped introduce our work to many people who had not heard about it. Publications like StirToAction, YES! Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Washington Post, and Shareable have covered much of the platform co-op work around the world. Thank you!

PCC’s Michael McHugh introduced the French Government to our work. I presented our activist work and research on the digital cooperative economy at venues ranging from PDF in NYC (video), Re:Publica in Berlin (Germany), Columbia University, Open Society Foundation in London, Harvard University Law Forum in Boston (US), RightsCon in Toronto (Canada), Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (Spain), SharingForum in Seoul (South Korea), the SPD Headquarter in Berlin (Germany), and Chinese University in Hong Kong (China).

PCC’s Michael McHugh attended Rutgers’ SMLR Union and Worker Ownership conference in Washington DC and the ICA research conference. Also in 2018, at Cooperatives UK, Pat Conaty published the important report “Working Together: Trade Union and Co-operative Innovations for Precarious Work.”

In Silicon Valley, I had a chance to meet with 45 leaders of Brazilian transportation cooperatives who showed interest in developing a national platform co-op. In Seoul, I met with the Association of Worker Co-ops, members of the government, and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which were interested in committing resources to this new sector.

In Hong Kong, together with Jack Qiu and Terence Yue, I co-convened our annual platform co-op conference. My Chinese colleagues started the Platform Co-op Consortium Hong Kong and Jack & Terence also co-authored a book on platform cooperativism in Mandarin. You can read this article, published in the local press, see photos or read my article in News.Coop.

Also in Hong Kong, David Li suggested not only launching a new co-op phone — an inexpensive smartphone produced and sold with platform co-ops preinstalled for the 1 billion co-op members worldwide — but he also proposed unionized manufacturing co-ops that produce robots as a way to empower unions. YES! Magazine published a piece to similar ends: “When Robots Take Our Jobs, Platform Cooperatives Are a Solution”

After a successful Platform Cooperativism meeting in Brussels that was supported by the Brussels Capital Region (!), in 2019, watch out for more activities on the amazingly designed website of Platform Co-op Brussels. Also don’t miss Lieza Dessin’s article “Zebras are Real and Move in Herds.”

In London, Oli Sylvester-Bradley and others successfully convened Open Coop 2018.

In Berlin, the platform co-op series at Supermarkt continued and a group of students published the first Platform Coop magazine. Read a report of one of the pc events in German.

In Indonesia, the first event on platform co-ops took place in Purwokerto.

In the United States, a panel at SXSW and events in Oakland and Berkeley engaged more people.

In 2018, Jen Horonjeff, founder of Savvy, the first patient-owned platform co-op, was named one of 50 most daring entrepreneurs of 2018. Up&Go was joined by Apple Eco-Cleaning co-op. In Seoul, South Korea, SanKu Jo is about to launch WeHome, a protocolary co-op for short-term rentals. In Montreal, Dardan Isufi and his team launched Eva, a new platform co-operative developing a blockchain-based rideshare app. (Read the white paper). The Guardian covered the platform co-op Resonate, which also received a million dollars from the venture arm of Rchain.coop.

In Japan, Anju Ishiyama wrote an article predicting that platform co-ops will flourish in Japan. Also Wired Japan covered the work of the PCC at The New School.

In 2019, Fairbnb will start to operate in Barcelona, Bologna, and Amsterdam. The team around Sito Veracruz and Damiano Avellino worked incredibly hard. Many challenges remain but finally, this ambitious, much-needed, and highly anticipated project will become reality.

Michael and I started PCC Community Chats with Ela Kagel, Micky Metts, and Nathan Schneider who introduced his new book Everything for Everybody.

In its annual report, FairShares Association outlines its support for the platform co-op ecosystem (see video). Fairshares Association enables people to set up cooperative businesses that are held accountable by all the stakeholders. Thank you, Rory Ridley-Duff.

Ours to Hack and to Own, the book I edited with Nathan Schneider was selected as one of the Top Tech Books of 2017 by Wired Magazine, early in 2018. MJ Kaplan wrote a piece on platform cooperativism for Non-Profit Quarterly. Sandeep Vaheesan and Nathan Schneider published a paper “Cooperative Enterprise as an Antimonopoly Strategy.”

Michael McHugh and I compiled a portfolio on platform cooperativism.

Together with Jutta Treviranus, I authored a commissioned 70-page research report for Sidewalk Labs Toronto exploring how a Smart Cities could be organized as a data cooperative.

After reporting on platform co-ops at the Biennale Della Cooperazione and the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Bookfair), Francesca Fo Martinelli authored a working paper on platform cooperativism in a publication of Fondazione Tarantelli. Many thanks also to Chiara Chiappa at Fondazione Centro Studi Doc for her work. Francesca has become a leading figure of the platform co-op movement in Italy.

Martijn Arets penned “Airbnb as a cooperative: a viable scenario?”

Armin Steurnagel delivered a TEDX talk in which he argued for the transformation of ownership models to create a better economy.

Stacco Troncoso posted the blog essay “The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: an Overview.” Stacco also wrote a case study of Fairmondo.

Michel Bauwens spoke in many venues on open cooperativism, the token economy, and distributed ledgers for co-ops.

Don’t miss Prosper Wanner’s text on Les Oiseaux de Passage, a platform coop for short-term rental. Prosper also responded to my series of articles in the French Socialter.

George Zarkadakis authored “Do platforms work? The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom” and Menno van Ginkel wrote “Leveraging blockchain technologies and platform cooperativism for decentralized food networks and short food supply chains.”

Looking ahead to 2019, I’ll be focusing on:

– the Platform Co-op Development Kit, and a research report that we will conduct on SEWA and the viability of platform co-ops and distributed governance in the context of India, supported by the Open Society Foundation.

– our international platform co-op conference November 7-9, 2019 at The New School & Columbia University, which will mark ten years of research and conferences on digital labor at The New School in NYC. Save the date!!!

– my next book, which is well in the making; I hope to finish the manuscript in 2019. If you have a notable new platform co-op, get in touch and share your experiences.

– additional in-person research and platform co-op events in Japan, Brazil, Austria, Germany, South Africa, Mexico, Spain, Tunisia, Georgia, Australia, and India (Kerala & Gujarat).

In April 2019, we will launch the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy with a fellowship program. The first year will be by invitation only but in 2020, we’ll open up the application process.

I’d like to thank all co-ops, scholars, policymakers, technologists, and activists who have worked with us in the last year. Keep it up in 2019. Our doors are open— get involved with our platform co-op work.

Happy New Year, everybody!

~ Trebor Scholz

The post 2018 and Onward: Where we are at with Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Co-op leaders, students, researchers, programmers, open source activists, and freelancers from various sectors came to the CUHK campus in the hills above Hong Kong, a short train ride from Shenzhen. During the conference, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium Hong Kong was launched with its own website, as was a new Chinese-language book on platform co-ops entitled 平台點合作.

There were several reasons for bringing the event to Hong Kong this year.

As platform cooperativism expands, we need to develop our thinking and practices also outside of a European and Anglo-American context. Countries like Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan all have vibrant co-op communities and long histories of mutual aid. Platform co-ops can and should learn from these diverse contexts. With 60% of the world’s population living in Asia, and with significant social and political challenges in the years ahead, the co-operative digital economy has the potential to make a significant impact on a number of pressing issues. From how to care for an ageing population, a growing number of refugees, worsening economic inequality, and the growth of the informal economy, platform co-ops and our Platform Coop Development Kit can improve the conditions and rights of workers, and help answer these challenges.

This year’s event used the agrarian metaphor of “sowing the seeds” to explore how platform cooperativism – and its key principles of broad-based platform ownership, democratic governance, open source, and co-design — can take root in Asia.

Participants heard from a range of co-operative entrepreneurs, scholars, activists, and hackers who shared their insights on everything from platforms used by rural co-ops in Taiwan to new developments in peer-to-peer licensing.

Conference conveners Jack Qui, Terence Yuen, and Trebor Scholz led panels that forged connections between diverse topics, from the use of blockchain technologies for refugee co-ops to considering new pathways for platform co-ops in Asia.

On the first day of the conference we focused on resources and organisations emerging across south-east Asia. Representing the Japanese Cooperative Alliance, Osamu Nakano documented the growth of the co-op movement in Japan which now counts 65 million members. Nakano emphasized the long term commitment of Japanese worker co-ops to platform cooperativism.

Namya Mahajan, managing director of the Federated Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa) in India, spoke about how Sewa supports more than 106 co-ops with a membership of more than 300,000. Mahajan outlined the “Sewa Way” and its unique approach to organising informal workers through a hybrid union and co-op model. She also reported how the collaboration with the Platform Co-op Development Kit had started.

Participants learned about the Smangus Aboriginal Community Labor Co-op in Taiwan, which was the subject of a recent Peabody Award-winning documentary, and its unique ability to motivate their young to stay and work for the co-op instead of moving to the city. Presenters also discussed the critical work of the Nangtang farming co-op in mainland China and the Alliance of Taiwan Foodbanks in Taiwan. All three groups participated in a hackathon in the days prior to the conference, prototyping new digital platforms for their organisations. Project ideas were based on Smangus’s need for a new platform to organise their recent surge of eco-tourists and the Taiwanese Foodbank’s need for a better digital platform that could improve the efficiency of receiving and disbursing food donations.

From South Korea, Changbok You showcased Sungmisan, an inspiring urban village in Seoul that offers residents a variety of co-operative living practices to combat inequality and social fragmentation.

Indonesian entrepreneur Henri Kasyfi discussed a new co-operative platform that can facilitate payment by facial recognition technology, specifically helping street merchants and the country’s poorest businesses. Also discussing new hardware possibilities, David Li, who founded the first Maker Lab in China, spoke about the possibilities for tech development in Shenzhen. With the Chinese city’s rapid rise as an industrial center for tech production, many formerly expensive commercial products can now be produced at astonishingly low prices. His lecture sparked a discussion about the potential for a new co-operative phone or co-operative hardware to be distributed by large co-ops. It also raised concerns about the social and ecological costs of such low-cost production.

As part of her spirited presentation, Gigi Lo showcased her project Translate for Her, which supports ethnic minority women living in Hong Kong who cannot read Chinese. Translate for Her allows these women to complete daily tasks like signing a lease for an apartment, or understanding their children’s report cards. The Singing Cicadas group, a small Hong-Kong-based production company of film-makers, writers, and illustrators focused on social justice storytelling, presented their decision to become a co-op.

Renowned sociologist Pun Ngai, co-author of Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers, argued that China’s revolution of 1949 is still unfinished – and that it now must challenge class conflicts within the global capitalist system. The challenge for platform cooperativism in Hong Kong, she argued, is to not become an empty slogan but to turn it into “a social movement embedded in real struggles”.

Trebor Scholz at the conference

Later, as a counterweight to some of these arguments, Melina Morrison, CEO of the Australian Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals, spoke about the strong state of the co-op movement and how it continues to grow and employ more workers, both in Australia and around the world.

Michel Bauwens argued that the rise of blockchain technology is being used to create a world where community and trust are absent. Bauwens imagines a post-blockchain world where – somewhere in the force field between public benefit and profits – platform co-ops and protocolary co-ops, as well as other organisational forms, could thrive.

Huang Sun-Quan, director of the Institute of Network Society at the China Academy of Art, discussed the unique coding and design dimensions of platform co-ops, arguing against “digital gentrification” in which only the rich members of communities benefit from technological developments.

The day concluded with a panel exploring platforms that use co-operative thinking for design and implementation. Jack Qiu calls them “amphibious platforms.” Although not formally platform co-ops, by attending the conference these groups can consider ways to integrate platform co-op principles into their work.

Panelists included Hong Kong entrepreneur Albert Liu who is developing a new ride-sharing programme for the city, and Jessamine Pacis from the Foundation for Media Alternatives in the Philippines. Pacis’ work focuses on the rapid growth of in-home cleaning services, which leaves workers rights in a grey area without clear legal protections. Platform co-ops are a workable, clear alternative. Ali Ercan presented his work on Needs Map based in Turkey, which directly connects people willing to make in-kind contributions with neighbours who have matching material or volunteer needs.

And panelist Nashin Mahtani, representing the PetaBencana group in Indonesia, outlined how their platform uses real-time information to deal with floods and urban disasters. With some of the highest concentrations of social media users in the world, Indonesians are constantly tweeting and posting about flooding. PetaBencana transforms this data into actionable information by hijacking it from social media platforms through an open source technology called Cognicity, and posts it to an open and accessible online map to give citizens up-to-date information on flooding.

Day 2 of the conference focused on how platform co-ops are emerging around the world, and how everyday users can democratically own and operate platforms regardless of their location.

Trebor Scholz opened the day by bringing greetings from a group of 45 taxi co-op leaders in Brazil, with whom he had just met. Trebor provided an update and analysis of the movement, explaining that the co-operative digital economy looks different from country to country. Over the past year, co-ops generally have continued to gain some momentum. New platform co-ops are popping up in new industries continuously. Through the Platform Co-op Development Kit, the New School team and developers from the Inclusive Design Research Centre will jump-start burgeoning platform co-ops and create a new online hub, sharing resources and facilitating learning. Learn more about this work here and write to [email protected] if you can think of ways in which you want to get involved in your country.

Participants from around the world followed, giving short updates on their projects.

Felix Weth of Fairmondo.de in Germany discussed his experience setting up a co-operatively run online marketplace. It was challenging: he had to learn to emphasise, and even prioritise, a sustainable co-operative business model first, which would enable the social benefits of the co-op model. Sharetribe co-founder and CEO Juho Makkonen called for a diversified digital economy and discussed how his company focuses on convenient platform hosting, so that anyone can start an online labour or market platform in a short period of time.

From France, Edith Darren presented on CoopCycle, an open source platform co-op focused on helping bicycle delivery workers become owners of their own food delivery platforms. Edith and her colleagues had attended the New York City conference in 2017 with just a nascent idea in mind. They proudly presented at this year’s event to show their progress, giving thanks to the numerous connections, insights, and encouragement from the previous conference.

Geddup.com, based in Australia, is a community action platform for trade unions, co-operatives, and schools that is currently converting to a platform co-op. Geddup allows groups to organise events, recruit volunteers, undertake votes, and gather feedback online. Co-founder Rohan Clarke outlined how co-operatives and social organisations can communicate better, maximise responses, and reward progress through the platform. Rohan also shared great notes from his experience at the 2018 conference which you can read here.

Danny Spitzberg from CoLab Co-op shared out results from the co-opathon, and updated participants on two of CoLab’s current projects. The first is helping to develop a cleaning co-operative called Up&Go in New York City, and the second is establishing a temporary staffing service called Core Staffing in Baltimore. Core Staffing is owned and operated by returning citizens, or previously incarcerated individuals.

Stephen Gill presented on CoopExchange, “the world’s first crypto exchange dedicated to buying and selling co-operative tokens”. Check out more videos about this work and follow the launch of their app on Twitter.

Swedish union leader Fredrik Söderqvist shared updates from Unionen, Sweden’s largest union, which organises private sector, white collar professionals into unions. In recent years, Unionen’s work has focused on standardising contracts for digital enterprises, and helping emerging platform co-ops and unions create new labour contracts and standardised regulations. From Smart.coop in Belgium, Lieza Dessein discussed the 20-year history and success of their mutual risk platform co-operative, which focuses on protecting freelancers against wage theft and late payment while also offering social benefits and co-working spaces. Freelancers become employees of SMart.coop and then share resources like accountants and lawyers, but continue to work independently as artists, writers, and digital creatives. Through their online platform, SMart.coop scaled significantly and now serves more than 85,000 members across Europe.

Next, a roundtable discussion focused on how blockchain technology could scale and reshape platform co-ops. Panel chair Jeff Xiong and Trebor Scholz asked the panelists to explore several key questions. These included how, beyond all the hype, blockchain can in fact facilitate better business practices – and what it can do right now. Panelists explored if and how blockchain can scale, and how to overcome problems with ecological sustainability. Tat Lam, for example, reported about his fascinating work assisting refugees with blockchain-supported identities. One of China’s first bloggers, Isaac Mao, discussed the use of blockchain technology for music.

Jack Qiu concluded day 2 by circling back to the theme of “Sowing the Seeds”. Through presentations, conversations, panels and group discussions, participants helped plant new seeds for the co-op movement in Asia and around the world. Though some of this nurturing and growth may be going on underneath the ground, and not readily apparent, the work continues to expand, creating a new network of roots and a new ecosystem. How quickly and intensely this ecosystem will flourish depends on the continued dedication of organisers, researchers, co-operative workers, and on additional support from traditional co-ops and philanthropic VCs stepping up to nurture this work.

Through the conference, practitioners and activists across Asia were able to share ideas, and plot a co-operative future of work. In this way, the event meaningfully showcased the diversity, open-endedness, and exploratory nature of many co-ops emerging in the region. Critical thinking and inspirational imagining of possible futures was balanced with real-world, on-the-ground examples of co-operatives and technologies succeeding right now.

But participants agreed that larger, traditional co-operatives need to do more to help nascent platform co-ops develop. Many debated and discussed how large-scale co-op federations and enterprises can do more to serve the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Others asked how co-operatives can spread worker ownership and workplace democracy also throughout the supply chains that they rely on. Cognisant of the need to take formal steps to address these issues themselves, Platform Cooperativism Consortium members agreed that platform co-ops should work towards adopting a form of certification such as that by the Fairwork Foundation, to ensure that workers’ rights are protected.

As we look ahead to 2019, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is excited to mark the ten-year anniversary of digital labor conferences at The New School. Please save the date for our annual conference next year to be held on November 7-9, 2019 at The New School in New York City.

See a photo album of the event here.

New to this work? Click here to learn more about the growing and global platform co-op movement.

The post The Platform co-op movement gathers in Hong Kong for its global conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various digital platforms are rarely given much consideration. But this is beginning to change with the rise in what is known as the platform cooperative movement, a broad network of individuals and organizations pushing to bring the values of cooperative ownership, governance, and management, into the digital labor landscape.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, New York, and chair of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture.” He’s been an advocate of the platform cooperativism movement for many years and launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (Shareable is part of the Consortium), which was awarded a $1 million dollar grant from Google.org, this week. The grant “focuses specifically on creating a critical analysis of the digital economy, and designing open source tools that will support platform co-ops working in sectors such as child care, elder care, home services, and recycling​ in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and India,” according to a press release by The New School. “This grant is a big win for the cooperative movement and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” Scholz said in a statement. “This Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops. It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.” We talked to Scholz as he was working on the project about the potential of platform cooperatives in addressing many of the challenges in the digital world today.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: You are in the process of launching an ambitious project around strengthening and spreading the platform cooperative movement. The project consists of many different elements and is structured as a kind of development kit for platform co-ops. I’ll let you tell us all about it in just a second, but first, can you explain what a platform cooperative is, and what problem or challenge they are addressing?

Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media at The New School: Platform co-ops are really about the broad-based ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms. So, imagine that Uber is owned by its drivers, or something like TaskRabbit is owned and operated by the workers. Or, in Europe, that Deliveroo is operated by the couriers and owned by the couriers. What this model leads to is a fair pay and a higher quality of work,so there is a dignity that you will not get in the extractive sharing economy. Also, the research on worker cooperatives shows that they are actually more productive than traditional businesses.

There are all sorts of economic and tax advantages as well. So think about something like AirBnb. You might be staying at an AirBnb in Amsterdam, or Barcelona, and much of the money spent at that Airbnb is taken out of the community, and the revenue doesn’t go through taxes into your local community, but is transferred instead right to Silicon Valley. On top of that there are all of the illegal operations of platforms like Uber and Lyft. It’s been proven, with the recent study from MIT, that these businesses contribute to a congestion of cities.

So, what the platform cooperativism movement is pushing back against is what I would sum up as a broken social contract. There are unsustainably low wages, compromised data and privacy, edge populations that aren’t considered in the design — so it’s a sort of big ego design, a waterfall design of Silicon Valley that pushes software onto people instead of co-designing it. There’s a shift away from direct employment which means a loss of worker voice and rights and benefits and of course centralized data ownership. The intellectual North Star for the alternative of the platform co-op model is really democratic governance, broad-based platform ownership.

So, tell us a bit about the Development Kit project.

The first part of the project is just to explain what is actually the problem with a business model like Lyft and many of these other companies, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo — what’s actually the problem? So that’s part of it, because I think it’s very important to actually change people’s mindsets about that.

Once they are convinced and are interested in actually changing it, they can see this whole ecosystem that already exists. So we are building a map that will have a lot of information about all of these cooperative platform businesses, some 240, that already exist, and then we will invite people to participate themselves. We are working at the Harvard Business Law School on a platform co-op legal clinic that is starting to get at the legal issues that exist in starting platform co-ops specifically, not just co-ops but platform co-ops,and trying to get these legal issues out of the way.

My initial idea was to somehow perhaps automate this, so that you can click and create a platform co-op, almost like a click-through legal contract. But that seems to be quite unlikely to happen because there are just way too many different co-op laws in the United States. But you know, why is it that you can’t just do something similar to what corporations do in Delaware, for example? You know, the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. actually incorporate in the state of Delaware. It’s an example of how one model in one state can work for all corporations. A centralized model. Why wouldn’t that be possible for cooperatives as well — just to make it simple?

The second thing is that we are starting an international network of lawyers through the Harvard network so that you could basically have lawyers in many countries where platform co-ops emerge that could help them to get the legal issues out of the way.

Another thing is that we are trying to address issues of governance. We’re trying to co-create and co-design, in direct collaboration with the co-ops themselves, a model where co-op members can use the platform to have a voice in the co-op itself. We are working with a group in India, for example, where the women are really dispersed all over the state of Gujarat. And so they have a hard time actually being meaningful members of the co-op, and so we tried to change that.

The third thing is an open source labor platform. So, basically something that can be customized for various users. So anyone trying to build one only needs a small amount of money to be able to start a platform like that. And yeah, so these are just some of the many things we are working on co-designing as part of this project.

And so it sounds like the idea of co-designing, of co-creating this toolkit, in a collaborative and participatory way plays a central role in this project?

That’s right. This needs to be opened up to the whole community — like to really activate the community around it and really do this with the community and not just for the community.That’s the idea. I’d like to really activate groups and really work with people, alongside people, and do it with them. I think that’s the way to go. And yeah, the project starts in July and will run for two years. After which, of course, we hope to get more funding and also try to engage other foundations to build on this. We are laying the technical foundations now, and there will be all of this infrastructure that will exist, that will be built, and the hope is that now others can come in and say, “Can you do this in Georgia, can you do this in Ohio?” You name it.

Can you describe some of the projects, some of the communities that you are working with or hoping to work with?

There are babysitters in Illinois, for example, that were organized by the union, and now we are coming in and adding an onboarding tool for them and maybe helping with a labor platform. And then there are these women in Ahmedabad, India, that I mentioned earlier, who we are working with to bring beauty services to people’s houses — like a platform service for doing hair and makeup, you know. So they are training twenty-seven women right now and in the fall it will be seventy-five, and then it will grow from there. And they are already all organized in a co-op and they will basically bring this sort of service to urban, young professionals.

There are many other projects. We talked to these 2,000 Uber drivers in Cape Town who wanted to drop out and start a platform co-op, we talked with trash pickers in the informal economy in Cairo, Egypt. There is no trash collection there and so through the Coptic Church these people get organized and want to start a platform where people can order trash pick-ups from them, and they would get paid for them. All these very, very diverse applications.

What is your ultimate dream for this project?

Well the project itself is much bigger than what we have right now. So, the goal is really to go into what we call “pull markets” — so markets where you don’t need so much marketing. For example, social care. There you see basically what we are doing, what we’re addressing, and then also what is not funded, you know? The dream is basically like a full-cycle implementation of this model in various territories. So we have projects that we could do in Brazil, and Colombia with refugees, in Germany, and you know all over the place. It’s very exciting.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header illustration by Susie Cagle

The post Platform Cooperativism Consortium awarded $1 million Google.org grant appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Public trust in the investor-owned platform economy is collapsing. Business models based on selling workers and users to Wall Street are under growing scrutiny, and a small but growing number of cooperatively-owned platforms present a real, positive alternative. How might we seize this moment to show the promise of platform cooperativism?

We invite proposals for creative media interventions that communicate platform cooperativism. These might be 2 minute-long videos, comic books, memes, infographics, games, or more. They might seek to deepen the platform co-op community or draw new people into it.

To apply for funding, submit a proposal through this form by May 5. By May 15, two commissions will be selected for $1,000 in support each, of which they’ll receive $500 upon selection and $500 upon completion of the project as proposed (or amended with approval of the challenge coordinators), provided it is completed and deployed before July 1. Commissions, also, can expect support from the platform co-op community and its promotional resources.

This challenge is funded through royalties from the book Ours to Hack and to Own. It is jointly administered by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and the Internet of Ownership. The coordinators are Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.

artwork by James Seibold

The post Apply for the 2018 #PlatformCoop Propaganda Challenge appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Platform cooperatives combine a technology platform with cooperative ownership. First described by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, this approach appeals both to traditional coops looking to go digital, and startups trying to build a fairer world. For some, it’s a natural response to the co-option of the sharing economy by capitalism.

Open 2017 is the first major UK conference to bring together this broad church of utopians, libertarians, open source advocates, trade unionists, and anarchists. Never have I heard the same words used on the same stage with such contradictory intent! “Solidarity” for me conjures up images of striking workers in the 1970s, but here it’s often used to imply community cohesion. How many other concepts are lost in translation? Do we need a new vocabulary to describe a new movement?

Open source and coops

A crazy dream…
Listening to @epilepticrabbit and @jdaviescoates on the parallels between #open and #coops … #opencoop @WeAreOpenCoop pic.twitter.com/acT1ty1Hil

— Bryan Mathers (@BryanMMathers) February 16, 2017

There’s a broad crossover between the values of the open source community and the values of the cooperative movement. Open source focuses on the process of producing and sharing code, whereas cooperatives care more about ownership and power structures. Both value transparency, both abhor hierarchy. The success of open source over the last 20 years gives hope to the cooperative movement: hope that one day, cooperative models of governance could be as widely used as open source code.

Single constituency or multi-constituency?

Cooperatives are a legal solution to a fundamental social problem: how best to distribute surplus? When we think of coops, in the UK we tend to think of consumer cooperatives, where you need to be a member to buy a product or service. These businesses usually aim to keep prices low for the customer. The other main category is producer cooperatives. Rory Ridley-Duffdescribed three types of employee owned business: trust owned (like John Lewis), direct owned, and worker cooperatives (like Suma). These often focus more on fair pay and employment security. Both of these structures prioritize one “constituency” — buyers of products, or sellers of labour.

Much rarer are the “multi-constituency” cooperatives, as described by Cliff Mills. These incorporate multiple stakeholders within their membership: consumers, producers, workers, suppliers, and the local community. While these are better suited to pursuing a common good, the risk is that by internalising tensions, they may end up stuck in a stalemate when forced to decide on issues where their members disagree. Platform cooperativism could provide an opportunity to codify group decision making practices that make multi-stakeholder coops more viable.

Scaling decision making

https://twitter.com/startuple/status/832267617784233986

There are as many decision making methods as there are organizations. Bob Cannell laid out a spectrum of options, from unanimity to anarchy: consensus, consensual, vetoes, majority voting (direct or representative), subsidiarity, and the “sorry not please” principle.

Tools like Loomio and Backfeed seek to scale group decision making, by making it easy for people to propose, vote, evaluate and reward. Common feedback from coop members was that culture was more important than the constitution or the technology. Practices like appreciative enquiry — concentrating on the positive when giving feedback — ensure that people feel their contributions are valued. This has parallels within open source and volunteer run organisations, where thanking people for their work is an important part of each interaction.

Federation: coops of coops

https://twitter.com/smcdoyle/status/832174783852924928

Are coops going to take over the world? Not unless it gets easier to start them, run them, and fund them. In terms of legal admin, it’s still harder to create your startup as a coop than to incorporate as a limited company. Running a successful coop requires different skills from top down management, and nascent coops need support in learning these culture lessons. Traditional VCs usually steer clear of coops, because they are not satisfied with “reasonable returns” — too busy unicorn hunting! Equity crowdfunding and FairShares need wider adoption to solve the funding problem, or growing coops could end up more constrained than enabled by their cooperative status.

Enspiral, Stocksy and Fairmondo are inspiring advocates of platform cooperativism, but more needs to be done to demystify their operational secret sauce. Cooperative federations seek to educate and nurture members. The Platform Cooperativism Consortium supports all platform coops, CoTechassists cooperatives in the technology sector, and AltGen encourages young people to start coops.

Open 2017 was a great place to meet people who are practising what they preach  Videos from the event are available on the website. Looking forward to next year!

Startuple is François Hoehl and Sinead Doyle. Find out more at startuple.works

Photo by Anders Adermark

The post Thoughts from Open 2017: Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Amidst misogyny, racism & political hostility, networks of economic alternatives in 2017. Happy new year!

Last week, we kicked around ideas for concrete projects that the Platform Cooperativism Consortium should realize this coming year. In the second part of this article, we’ll devote ourselves to just that: pragmatic objectives for the next twelve months. But for our project to have legs to stand on, we — the people involved in this movement— also need to think through the bigger picture and situate platform cooperativism historically. With that in mind, we went back and listened again to the contributions at the “Building the Cooperative Internet” event last year at The New School.

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.

In sum, we should first of all be a sounding board for the needs of the platform co-op community. We are no lone star heroes but instead, strive for solidarity and collaboration with other projects and organizational forms. We aim for economic experimentation, building playful, intellectual and practical incubators.

Before we get to our goals for 2017, we are pleased to report that the PCC managed to hire Samuel Tannert who is helping us to cope with day-to-day communications and our ongoing research. We started a draft of a Wikipedia in-depth article about platform cooperativism, for example. It should be live in a week or two. With Samuel, we are also working on streamlining the onboarding process for all who’d like to join and contribute to the PCC. See profiles of some of our researchers on the Consortium website at http://platformcoop.newschool.edu/index.php/about/. If you are one of them but have not added your profile yet, please contact Samuel.

Out of the working document that we generated together in 2016, we extracted a set of activities for the PCC, but it should be obvious that we need to focus on a small number of projects. With that in mind, for 2017, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is focusing on the following projects.

1) A mooc about the cooperative platform economy. We are immediately moving to fundraise and create a free, massively open online course on the subject of the cooperative platform economy. This course will be for motivated individuals and groups worldwide who would like to start a platform co-op or reflect more on its the implications of an open social economy. It will also serve as a resource for those in the academy, providing teachable segments which instructors can use in their classes. If the task at hand is, as Benkler argues, the seizure of this unique historical moment to reframe the way politico-economic processes are understood, the availability of this courseware will be a vital tool in the dissemination of this new understanding which we are building together.

2) Templates. We plan to work on legal templates to help the community to launch platform co-ops, at least in the U.S.

3) Design. A design team already started a design overhaul of the platform.coop website. It will be rolled out in February. Send us your input or requests for features, please.

4) Fundraising. We are about to launch a donation channel and are looking for first donations to support I) the operation of the PCC, II) the massively open online course about the cooperative platform economy, and III) our work on legal templates that make it easier to start up platform co-ops.

5) The Platform Cooperativism Consortium will continue to interview different platform co-ops about their ethical commitments, lessons learned, ownership models, and systems of self-governance and publish articles, which make the community aware of projects within the ecosystem. The goal of these stories is to bring people within the ecosystem closer together. Our network will be as potent as the relationships of the people within it. You can keep abreast of this effort by following the stories we post here, on http://platform.coop/stories. A list of articles appears at the end of this article. We are open to review your platform co-op story. Submit it to us!

6) We will also our project of mapping the growing landscape of platform cooperatives and related democratically-run projects by promoting the excellent work by the team at Internet of Ownership who have produced a comprehensive directory of platform cooperatives, many articles, and are keeping a running calendar of events related to platform cooperativism.

7) In the fall of 2017, we will convene the next event at the New School. Write us your wish list for the event.

8) We are planning on launching a European sister organization of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium.

9) Platform cooperativism events are coming up in many cities including London, Brussels, Melbourne, and Berlin.

What are your priorities?

Stories on platform.coop

• Some People Are So Poor, All They Have is Money
  By Ela Kagel and Thomas Doennebrink
• Commune ? ? ? : a Taxi Co-op Owned by Passengers and Drivers. A Proposal from Berlin.
  By Arthur Röing Baer
• Reflections on Platform Cooperativism
  By Jonas Algers
• Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” Link Mega-List
• How to Connect the Platform Ecosystem? A Report from Mexico City.
  By Sebastian Romero
• Own the Next Generation of Streaming Music
  By Peter Harris
• The User Experience in Platform Cooperativism
  By Enric Senabre and Ricard Espelt
• Twitter kaufen, Demokratie erweitern (in Deutsch)
  By Ute Scheub und Thomas Dönnebrink
• Sci-Fi Imagines the Cooperative Platform Economy as a Victor
  By Trebor Scholz
• In Brussels, Online Food Couriers Launch Their Own Platform Co-op
  By Matthieu Lietaert
• How to Set Up a Platform Co-op for Refugees in Europe
  By RefugeesWork

Lead Image: Christopher Chavez

The post This year you’ll seize the means of production appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Event convener Trebor Scholz opened proceedings by talking about how platform cooperativism provides an alternative to the extractive on-demand economy dominated by platforms like Uber which millions of people increasingly depend upon for their livelihoods, but “which are owned by a group so small you could fit them all on a Google bus.”

Trebor Scholz opens the conference discussing the prospects of Platform Cooperativism. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

Day one showcased an international group of practitioners and policymakers to discuss regulation, investment, legal, and design implications of the cooperative internet. Kristy Milland, community manager of TurkerNation.com, spoke passionately of the precarious conditions faced by crowd workers on Mechanical Turkwho perform “human intelligence tasks” that can’t be done by computer. The work pays little and is physically and mentally taxing. It can include processing images of extreme violence and porn, which can result in trauma. Mechanical Turkers can’t talk to each other or requestors on the platform, but are banding together on forums like Turker Nation to support each other and demand better conditions. Kristy hopes to launch an ethical version of Mechanical Turk to overcome the isolation and powerlessness experienced by many digital laborers.

Kristy Milland of Turker Nation: From Digital Worker Subsistence to Organized Resistance. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

The afternoon session on how to build platform co-ops featured presentations on free software, lean product development, and community-centered design. Una Lee, founder of design studio, And Also Too, spoke about her design work with communities that advance social justice. Una facilitates the Design Justice Network, which aims to connect design practitioners with people who have been historically marginalized by design and center them in the creation of platforms, objects, and systems they rely on.

Jason Weiner tells the story of Green Taxi Co-op in Denver

Douglas Rushkoff closed day one with a talk that boiled down to a question — what if Donald Trump’s election represented an opportunity for platform cooperativism? After all, platform cooperatives support workers and local economies, a position not far off from Trump’s pro-worker and anti-trade rhetoric. Rushkoff also offered a media analysis of the election and our historical moment. Rushkoff reflected on the media bias of the net, how it enabled the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, which is great for disrupting the establishment, but so far terrible at building an alternative. He suggested that the Democratic Party has become a platform monopoly where “true participation in the party was about as real as participation in Facebook.” According to Rushkoff, we are transitioning from a TV media environment to a digital media environment. The TV media environment was globalist in nature and epitomized by a global public imaginary. On the other hand, the digital media environment is discrete and dominated by a binary logic of yes or no, up or down. Trump is a digital media candidate: “let’s build a wall, let’s divide the lines.” The other digital bias is memory, as in the random access memory (RAM) of a PC or server: “let’s make America great again.” Rushkoff ended with a provocative thought experiment: what if instead of protesting Trump’s victory, progressives applied for positions in the new administration? Rushkoff’s suggestion that Trump’s victory could be an opportunity for platform cooperativism was met with skepticism if not rejection, though it did spark a lively debate.

Later that night, Trebor Scholz officially launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC), a global network of researchers, platform co-op enterprises, independent software developers, artists, designers, lawyers, activists, publishing outlets, and funders. The ceremony was held in the Orozco Room at the New School, which houses rare frescos depicting worker struggles completed by the Mexican public art muralist José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) in 1931. The PCC supports the cooperative platform economy through research, experimentation, education, advocacy, documentation of best practices, technical support, the coordination of funding, and events. Built upon the concept of platform cooperativism, the consortium is anchored in collective ownership, democratic governance, and a decisive commitment to the global commons, inventive unions, social justice, as well as ecological and social sustainability. You can check out the collaboratively written founding documents here to learn more about the purpose and function of the consortium.

Launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at the New School. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

Day two discussions focused on global opportunities for convergence among worker resistance movements, unions, and cooperatives. Discussion focus on the question, how can online co-ops help workers and the labor movement cope with or build their own platform economy? Yochai Benkler opened day two on an optimistic note, “One of our major hopes is that there’s significant ability to do things below the level of national government.” Benkler characterized Brexit and Trump’s election as victories for xenophobic economic nationalism in rejection of globalism, free trade and cosmopolitanism. Benkler paints platform cooperativism as a form of “network pragmatism” at the vanguard of the next economic paradigm, what Benkler calls the “open social economy” where ethical commitment shapes technological deployment. Benkler continued, “History suggests that cooperatives can be sustainable where accepted and will neither kill or be killed by investor-owned firms. Slack in markets offers ample room for ethical, socially-embedded markets.” Benkler ended with a discussion on the commons, which he argued offers an opportunity to organize the economy through cooperative models built on diversity and polycentricism.

Yochai Benkler: Towards an Open Social Economy

This was followed by a panel on the union co-op model panel moderated by Trebor Scholz. It brought together cooperatives, unions and worker associations with representatives from the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the AFL-CIO, Teamsters, SMart, 1worker1vote.org and the United Services Union (ver.di) in Berlin. Unions have steadily declined over the last few decades, but have at least one new and important role to play by helping workers to form cooperatives, representing members of union-formed cooperatives in government, and creating a healthy cooperative ecosystem where cooperatives collaborate and share resources. There was also a strong call from multiple panelists to embrace a diversity of strategies for supporting workers.

Evgeny Morozov opened the following panel on cities by talking about how the sharing economy, as popularly known, epitomizes five characteristics of late capitalism and is at the vanguard of the latest wave of capitalist adaptation. The first of these is globalization where low-cost labor settings improve profitability. The second is financialization where firms create new financial instruments and abstractions to boost profits. The third is flexibilization which shifts labor-related risks and costs from employer to employee. The fourth is monopolization — an increasing tolerance of monopolies due to changes in anti-trust law and acceptance of market fundamentalism. The final characteristic is informationalization where data is commoditized and leveraged for ever-increasing market power. Morozov applied this analytical framing to platform cooperativism by concluding that “if we want to talk about the -ism, we have to deliver on the economics and the politics.” Shareable co-founder Neal Gorenflo followed with a talk about the need to collaborate on policy at the local level and create an effective policy exchange to support platform cooperatives and the commons in general in cities around the world. A highlight of the panel were Mayo Fuster Morell and Francesca Bria of Barcelona whose talks taken together offered an inspiring vision of “rebel cities” powered by citizens, the commons, sustainability, and feminist values. Their vision comes out of their pioneering commons-based technology policy work with Barcelona’s city council and mayor Ad Colau.

On Sunday, day three of the conference, Micah Sifry and team at Civic Hall hosted an unconference that featured an open stream of project proposals for the platform co-op space. This open format surfaced an impressive diversity of proposals including distributed manufacturing, the psychology of cooperative conversion, youth education, founding and scaling co-op investment, the Buy Twitter campaign, media and communications infrastructure, tools to lower the barrier to start a co-op, democratic mass communication, blockchain applications, co-op commons licenses, public sector partnerships, trade union engagement and worker politics, industrial-level issues, drivers of systemic change, health data co-ops, startup metrics adapted for co-ops, holocracy and open source.

One of the sessions I attended was on public sector partnerships convened by Becky Michelson from Engagement Lab at Emerson College in Boston. Participants brainstormed key challenges and opportunities for city engagement in platform cooperativism. The group split into two topic groups for a deeper dive into how to build the research evidence base for city partnerships and practical questions related to city procurement of services. The policy group I participated in with Annette Mühlberg from United Services Union (ver.di) in Berlin discussed how to shift the narrative in city government to better serve the public good via support for platform cooperatives, social enterprises and responsible sharing startups.

Public sector partnership session at Platform Cooperativism Unconference. Photo credit: Christopher Chavez.

The second platform cooperativism conference signaled a clear shift from the movement building of 2015’s event towards much deeper engagement by mature actors concerned with practical questions of appropriate co-operative business models, financing, design and legal considerations, and partnerships with unions and city governments for greater scale and impact. The launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and follow up events planned for the UK, Canada and Australia in 2017 will help to advance the case for the cooperative platform economy globally.

The post International Consortium Launched at Second Platform Cooperativism Conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Platform cooperativism, as he puts it, is “a way of joining the peer-to-peer and co-op movements with online labor markets while insisting on communal ownership and democratic governance.” I talked to him about this young movement, its rise, and the steps ahead.

About half-a-year after the first platform co-op event in New York, what are the outcomes?

The New School event was not the first platform cooperativism event in New York City, but from the very beginning, I noticed an unusual degree of interest. Workers, unions, labor advocates, cooperatives, legal scholars, designers, and civic technologists were all over it — especially young people who could not see a clear perspective in the current system, were enthusiastic about a realistic but slightly different pathway to more control over their life opportunities; it’s a more holistic vision of their future that starts with the question: How do we want to live?

Facing the every day realities of digital feudalism — or, framed differently, a platform capitalism that is built on socialized risks and privatized profits — more and more people warm up to visions of a world where wages are de-linked from labor, a global commons that is sustained by a populace supported by universal basic Income. The resonance of Paul Mason’s Post-Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future attests to the desire for this change. The peer-to-peer movement, with stellar examples of commons-peer production like FLOSS and Wikipedia, is making absolutely pivotal contributions to this end, but there are not enough workable proposals for a transition.

For the near future, this movement has not practically, directly addressed the need of the more than one-third of the contingent part of the American workforce to make a living. These are the independent contractors, day laborers, and freelancers. Between 2010 and 2013, more than 10 million people earned income through online platforms. Without state support, social benefits, or labor rights, they are left behind. And this is obviously not only a problem in the United States, but also in countries like Kenya and Nigeria where Airbnb and Uber are starting to take over the short-term rental and transportation markets despite the rich traditions of cooperativism in those countries.

Some sectors seem to be particularly suited for experiments with cooperatively owned online platforms. Home health care, for example, is an area where this model of social organization around technology could succeed on a larger scale. In Reinventing Organizations, Frederic Laloux offers a description of one such successful model in the Netherlands. All over Europe, and especially in Germany, cooperatively owned online platforms could help refugees sustain themselves. Importantly, these need to be designed with the help of refugees from day one. In Brussels, I met with refugees from Syria and Iraq, which showed me the clear promise of this idea.

There is a need for research into the needs of existing cooperatives. While the platform co-op proposal may be well-suited for a cooperatively owned bookstore, a stock photography site, or a cleaning cooperative, it may not work for other types of co-ops.

How did citizens take over the idea?

Events about platform cooperativism are currently taking place in many cities — from Berlin to Barcelona, Valencia, London, Oakland, Amsterdam, Vancouver, Melbourne, and Bologna. The City Council of Barcelona just agreed to support platform cooperatives as part of their innovation plan for local development. And in Berlin — convened by Ouishare connector Thomas Doennebrink and the founder of the creative resource center Supermarkt, Ela Kagel — a platform co-op group started to meet on a regular basis.

To keep the momentum going and to further build, grow, and sustain these initiatives, I am convening “Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” November 11-13, 2016 again at the New School in New York City. Shareable and Civic Hall are already confirmed as partners in this event.

What about those who cannot make it to New York City this Fall?

We will hopefully be able to live stream the event.

What are the next steps?

Considering the threats for cooperative practices posed by TTIP and the recently published guidelines of the European Commission on the “sharing economy,” one of the hopes for this event in November is to bring together policymakers from various “rebel cities” (thank you, David Harvey) like Berlin, Paris, or Barcelona to talk about and globally coordinate thoughtful regulatory responses to the “sharing economy” and to promote social innovation and experiments with digital cooperatives, in particular. The goal is to link platform co-ops to the pro-commons movement and the solidarity economy more broadly.

While Nathan Schneider and I conceived of the event last November as a coming out party of the cooperative, decentralized Internet, the gathering this Fall will focus more on rolling up our sleeves to make it happen. The questions on the table concern not only the ways in which platform cooperatives can contribute to the commons, but they are also about the legal aspects — of blockchain technology, for instance — design, funding, social organization, governance — of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations like Arcade City, for example — ecological sustainability, data transparency, a deep understanding of the social impact that is created beyond revenues measured in dollars and cents, and the role of unions, academia, credit unions, and municipalities. We should start incubators and accelerators to advance this work, especially with existing cooperatives that are best suited for this model of organization of labor. To host these initiatives, we should consider making creative and unconventional use of public libraries and museums.

Nathan Schneider created the Internet of Ownership, which is a very useful directory that will significantly help to follow and give visibility to emerging projects. Nathan has also advocated this model extensively.

In addition, we also need to more clearly articulate platform cooperativism as a cross-generational feminist critique of the future of work, as Mayo Fuster Morell rightfully suggested. A discussion about a cooperative future of work must also take social reproduction into account.

Are you planning to publish something about all this?

In 2014, I wrote “Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy” and last Fall, I published a longer introductory piece, which has now been published in English, German, and Spanish. Italian, French, Chinese, and Portuguese translations will follow. Then, in the Fall, my book,  Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, will be available from Polity.

And together with Nathan Schneider, I edited a volume titled Ours to Hack and to Own, for which we asked dozens of designers, workers, and other participants in the event last Fall to answer the question of what they’d tell someone who wants to start a platform co-op. This, too, will be available in the Fall.

You talked last year about the setup of a foundation?

Not exactly; we are in the process of setting up a Platform Cooperativism Consortium that will help to connect the practitioners in this eco system with each other and with organizations that can support their effort to change minds and bring real value and a fairer Internet to real people.

For updated information in coming weeks stay tuned @platformcoop

Matthieu Lietaert is an investigative journalist, director of the film The Brussels Business about corporate lobbying in the EU, and author of the book Homo Cooperans 2.0 about the “coop-laborative economy.”

Cross-posted from Shareable

The post Bringing the Platform Co-op “Rebel Cities” Together: An Interview with Trebor Scholz appeared first on P2P Foundation.