Today, four socio-technical systems are competing for dominance, two of them extractive towards communities and resources, two of them generative. The good news is that there are generative alternatives for the 2 exploitative ones. I talk here about platform coops, ledger coops, urban/bioregional provisioning coops, and cosmo-local protocol coops and I explain about the transition from a marxist capitalism, to a proudhonian capitalism, and possibly to a commons-centric, post-capitalist civilization.
Video from HK PCC, YouTube

The post Michel Bauwens on Technological Sovereignty in the Transition from a Marxist Capitalism to a Proudhonian Capitalism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

photo credit: Trebor Scholz

Last month, after a year of preliminary conversations, the team leading work on the Platform Co-op Development Kit launched a collaboration with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – the largest organization of informal workers anywhere in the world. SEWA, a union of 1.5 million members and a federation of cooperatives with over 300,000 members offering services such as child care and insurance, is headquartered in Ahmedabad but operates all across India, organizing poor women workers in the informal economy.

By partnering with our team as one of five pilot groups for the Kit, SEWA Federation will be able to co-design two projects. One will provide a democratic governance tool for the members of the co-ops that work under the SEWA umbrella but are geographically too far apart to meaningfully participate in its activities. The second project is a platform co-op for beauty services.

About Sewa

SEWA union launched in 1972 with a small group of women who wanted to secure micro-loans to start their own businesses. Having been told they were “not bankable” by the nationalized state banks at the time, founder Ela Bhatt helped them learn to launch their own bank. By pooling their resources, and with contributions as little as ten rupees from many women in the community, SEWA established its own cooperative bank in 1974 with 100,000 Indian Rupees, or slightly more than 1377 U.S. dollars. The women began to recognize their own power. Ela Bhatt’s first book was consequently titled “We Are Poor but So Many.” Next, the women turned their attention to reducing medical expenses, as they were proving to be an obstacle to the women paying back their loans. Within a few years SEWA created a healthcare cooperative, which now provides affordable medicine. More and more enterprises continued to develop under the cooperative model. And while SEWA focused first on organizing urban women, they eventually also expanded into rural areas.

Today, Sewa Federation is comprised of 106 cooperatives, working in industries such as milk production and financial services, prescription medications and garment manufacturing. Importantly, Sewa Federation is a multi-denominational enterprise with women from various religious backgrounds: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jainist, and Buddhist. Sewa offers a range of services: from education to catering, childcare, and other services. The key to SEWA’s success has been its integrative approach, centering an entire ecosystem of co-ops around the needs of poor self-employed women in the informal economy. Learn more about SEWA’s unique approach through this report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).

We are grateful to the ILO for introducing us to SEWA.

Building A Beauty Services Platform Co-op

The collaboration with SEWA Federation is planned for the next two years. The platform co-op for beauty service will allow users to request a worker-owner to come to their home to do makeup, threading, waxing, and haircuts or massages. The platform will meet a growing demand for home services in the beauty sector in Ahmedabad and other Indian cities, as evidenced by the growth of extractive platforms such as UrbanClap and VLCC.

During his trip to SEWA to discuss this platform, Trebor Scholz met with both Namya Mahajan, managing director of SEWA Federation, and an initial cohort of 25 women who are currently being trained to work through the platform co-op. Learn more about the Federation’s commitment to the project in this short video with Namya:

When Trebor joined the workers in their first training session, they were learning how to greet a client at their home by stating their name, which was new to them as it is not common for low-caste women to state their names. Interestingly, many of the women already own or have access to smartphones. They are also familiar with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. But scheduling their work through a platform co-op will be new to them.

In discussing what they would like to see in the platform co-op, the young women emphasized their concerns about safety when traveling to clients and working in their private homes. In the workshop, the women asked for a panic button for workers to be integrated into the app. The button would allow them to quickly alert two friends and the police in case of an emergency. One of the more experienced beauty workers strongly felt that there should be no individual worker profiles available to customers. In order to protect the women from assault and harassment, users of the app should have no choice over which co-op member who is providing a particular service. They also expressed interest in a GPS feature that would allow a co-op manager to know their whereabouts.

By December of this year, once a prototype has been completed, work through the platform can begin with 25 women workers. A second group of 50 women will then begin the training, to join the platform in March 2019. The goal is to upscale the platform to anywhere between 500 and 1000, the average size of a SEWA cooperative. In contrast to the 30% of the revenue extracted from workers on traditional platforms, SEWA Federation only plans to take 15% to cover administrative and educational expenses. If successful, the platform co-op could even expand to cities like Patna, Chandigarh, and Delhi. Finally, because the women will be working in the clients’ homes, the platform could eventually offer other household services like cleaning, child care, painting, plumbing, electrical work, pet care, carpentry, cooking, and waste collection.

Additional support is coming from Godrej Consumer Products Limited. Godrej is contributing the initial capital investment for the business. It also supports the training for the beauty workers through curriculum.

Strengthening Distributed Co-op Governance

The second platform for SEWA will focus on organizing the cooperatives of the SEWA Federation spread out across the state of Gujarat, and additional cooperatives all across India. Distributed democratic governance is a significant challenge for many cooperatives, and given the number and diversity of co-ops within SEWA, and their geographic distribution across the entire state, SEWA needs a new online tool to help them organize, educate, and make decisions. Just think of the Adivasi women in the remote parts of the mountains in Southern Gujarat. While new tools like Enspiral’s Loomio saw amazing uptake, distributed democratic governance remains a big challenge for co-ops worldwide. But if trained to use technology and given smartphones, the women led by village elders could co-govern the co-op from afar. First conversations led us to imagine such functionality, also useable on flip phones, as follows:

• A decision-making tool in which co-ops can vote and decide on strategic matters and resource distribution within the federation

• A social-networking tool in which cooperators can connect and message each other

• An educational resources tool in which SEWA can share new videos, manuals, instructions, and best practices directly with co-ops, and co-ops too can share business information directly with the SEWA umbrella organization

These services, still pending the co-design process, would allow for improved business practices and stronger democratic governance for SEWA Federation across Gujarat. They could collect data from co-op members that could then be shared with policymakers, for instance. Thus, the tool could impact state policies so that local and national governmental policy better serves the interest of co-ops. The platform will also need to respond to the many different languages spoken by cooperators in the region (e.g. Gujarati, Hindi, English, etc.) and incorporate audio tools. In short, a new governance tool would dramatically improve the functionality and effectiveness of SEWA Federation.

More applied research in the area of distributed governance among precarious in the informal economy is much needed.

Sewa Federation is also interested in a cooperative online marketplace that would allow some of their co-ops to sell artisanal products, snacks, garments, generic medicine and Ayurvedic medicinal products.

In November, the Inclusive Design Research Center will start leading co-design sessions with women workers in Ahmedabad and then develop platform prototypes based on their specific needs. Trebor discussed with SEWA’s own video production cooperative the production of a series of testimonials documenting this process, interviewing workers in co-design sessions and creating videos in which women discuss their experiences with the platform co-op. Through the documentation of workers’ experiences, the videos will capture the potential of this model.

Learning from Sewa

The key to SEWA’s success has been their holistic, federated approach. SEWA places poor women workers in the informal economy at the center of an ecosystem of co-ops that seeks to address their various social needs, not just economic necessities.

In the U.S., many long-standing, very large and wealthy cooperatives have lost the focus on support for those who need it most. While large consumer, purchasing, and agricultural cooperatives like REI COOP, Ace Hardware, and Organic Valley prove economically successful and sustainable, they fail to significantly address broader social problems. They do not tackle complicated social and economic needs, like full-time workers lacking healthcare, rising income inequality, soaring childcare costs, etc. Workers in such co-ops sometimes do not exercise or feel inspired to participate in democratic governance.

By understanding and learning from SEWA, workers and cooperatives elsewhere can envision new ways of organizing their workplace, and re-orienting their cooperative identities. For example, larger U.S. cooperatives could commit to the 7 cooperative principles (especially the one focused on co-ops helping other co-ops), by investing in new startup projects (including platform co-ops) and creating spaces for incubation. They could also make a real commitment to open source tools, so that new platform co-ops do not have to waste resources and reinvent the wheel. By carrying SEWA’s integrated approach to the gig economy, we can imagine a stronger cooperative ecosystem that addresses the social and economic needs of workers in the informal economy, which account for over 90% of the Indian economy.

We are excited to be co-leading this work with SEWA over the next two years. As always, write to us if you would like to contribute ([email protected]).

For more information and the original post visit platform.coop

The post ​“We Are Poor but So Many”: Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and the Team of the Platform Co-op Development Kit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Each week, we struggle with how our values fit in our workplaces and platforms.

We’re a group of tech workers who see how the tech industry shapes our lives and data, and how it is complicit in forms of oppression, including racism, classism, sexism, cisgenderism, homophobia, and xenophobia. We also believe there are alternatives, through equitable ownership and control. That’s why we’re organizing “User, Worker, Owner! Bringing Democracy to Work.”

Come be part of our gathering on May 2 in downtown Oakland.

Date/Time
Date(s) – May 2, 2018
5:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location
VSCO

Join people from  and other groups committed to tech equity. Participants will define problems they face in workplaces and platforms, connect with like-minded peers, and explore strategies to shift ownership and control with an intersectional equity lens. We’ll have talks from digital labor researcher Niloufar Salehi and co-op scholar Nathan Schneider. Workshop topics we’re considering include:

– Collective governance – representation and consensus-based decision making
– Self-management – conflict resolution and growing pains in distributed team
– Shared finance and ownership – co-operative conversions and alternatives
– Community rules – product ethics, codes of conduct, and trust & safety
– Open space for more!

We’ll have light food and drinks. Nobody turned away for lack of funds. To request free tickets, or to help sponsor the event, email [email protected].

RSVP on Eventbrite here!

Tell us what you want to get out of this event by filling in this survey 

Photo by JD Hancock

The post User, Worker, Owner! May 2 in Oakland appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Ok; this was the short answer to the question I posed in the tittle. But if you want to know a little more about the book content, keep reading. I am going to share with you some key ideas developed in the book. All the companion quotes are from the book, so you have a glimpse of what you will find.

However, I have some objections and for me some things are missing. In my next post I will engage critically with the book. In the meantime, you may want to read a critical perspective that Las Indias Electrónicas just posted about the Coop Platform movement.

1. Centralized platforms’ business models are old wine in new wineskins

• “It’s the same old industrialism, being practiced with powerful new digital tools” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb, which own no vehicles or real-estate, capture profits from the operators of the cars and apartments for which they provide the marketplace. Neither of these business models is very new” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “The decisive question is not who owns any kind of means of production but who owns the dominant means of production. These used to be the factory, the machinery. They are now becoming the big algorithms, the constantly adjusted and ever-developing virtual machinery.” (Christoph Spehr)

2. Centralized platforms disempower its users

• “The idea of disintermediation was central to the emancipatory visions of the Internet, yet the landscape today is more mediated than ever before” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).
• “Capitalist platforms based on the sale of audience commodity and capturing marketplace rents demand a sacrifice of privacy and autonomy” (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

3. Centralized platforms fake trust environments

• “turns out that we act differently when we rate people to when we rate products […] The distorted rating distributions serve the interests of the platform owners, making the platform appear to be a higher-trust environment than it really is […] (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis)

4. The time for Coop Platforms may have arrived

• First, disruption. Things are very much up in the air. Uber is growing dominant in personal-transportation services in the United States, but Uber could still be the Friendster, or at most the LinkedIn, of the on-demand economy if the cooperative movement moves fast into a broad range of services. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Second, we are in the cultural moment of cooperation. Wikipedia, free and open-source software (FOSS), citizen journalism, and other forms of commons-based peer production have made normal people encounter cooperation and its products as a matter of everyday practice. The decades-long insistence of expert economics that we should think of ourselves as self-interested rational actors acting with guile is bumping up against a daily reality that refutes it (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Third, commons-based peer production has provided a template and experience with the possibility of large-scale enterprises managing and governing themselves through online cooperative platforms. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Finally, networks have destabilized the model of the firm. Transaction costs associated with both market exchanges and social sharing have declined; interactions once preserved for firms that combined capital with contractual commitments for labor, materials, and distribution can now be done in a more distributed form (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)
• Platform co-ops can benefit from the bursting of the content bubble (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• App store opportunities are drying up (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible).

5. Coop-Platforms can offer what centralized ones are pretending -but are not able- to deliver

• “The dominant players continue to brand themselves as a community, while users experience the systems more like customers. There is an opportunity for platform co-op designers to revive the project of establishing genuine community” (Cameron Tonkinwise—Convenient Solidarity: Designing for Platform Cooperativism)
• “In many ways, the platform co-op model is well suited to counteract some of the ownership and sustainability problems intrinsic to venture-backed enterprises that we encountered firsthand. But near-future tech platforms will be built upon rapidly evolving infrastructures and will require sudden adaptations to new capabilities” (David Carroll—A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible)
• Platform cooperatives—as a directed affront to the platform of monopolies characterizing digital industrialism—offer a means of both reclaiming the value we create and forging the solidarity we need to work toward our collective good” (Douglas Rushkoff—Renaissance Now)
• “open cooperatives internalize negative externalities; adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation of immaterial and material commons; and are socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally” (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops)

6. However, decentralization does not imply equality.

• The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics. (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls)

7. New decentralized architectures need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist

• Going back to an early Internet architecture of cooperative, decentralized servers, as projects like Diaspora, GNU Social, and others are attempting to do, will not work. This is precisely the sort of architecture that antidisintermediation was designed to defeat. Decentralized systems need to be designed to be counteranti-disintermediationist. Central to the counterantidisintermediationist design is the end-to-end principle; platforms must not depend on servers and admins, even when cooperatively run, but must, to the greatest degree possible, run on the computers of the platforms users (Dmytri Kleiner—Counterantidisintermediation).

8. Platforms are us: community is what gives value

• Platforms are us: Platforms aren’t just software applications and the companies that administer them. What gives a platform value, in most cases, is the community of users that employ the platform, along with the networks, data, and ideas they create (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)
• As part of our project, we are developing our own conceptual framework that identifies six dimensions to assess and measure value: 1. Community building 2. Social use-value of the resource created 3. Reputation 4. Achievement of the stated mission 5. Monetary value 6. Ecological value and derivative processes (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

9. Coop Platforms are not as much for autonomy and independence as for multi-stakeholder interdependence.

• This kind of shift in focus means leaving behind some of the cherished emphasis that the last cooperative wave put on autonomy and independence; instead, cooperative developers have been enthusiastically exploring ways to partner with city governments, labor unions, forward-thinking philanthropy, and impact investors to create mechanisms to finance and support the work of building a more democratic economy. Cooperative purity can easily become an obstacle to achieving meaningful scale and inclusive impact. For instance, insisting that members self-finance their own enterprise risks creating a closed circle of relative economic privilege rather than a movement to truly democratize capital. Similarly, insisting on autonomy from government intervention and support means that the policies behind traditional economic development will continue to grind away, subsidizing corporations and leaving cooperatives to fend for themselves (John Duda—Beyond Luxury Cooperativism).

10. Well designed Coop Platforms can provide dignified and sustainable livelihoods for those who work on them

• Based on this research, we’ve begun to identify some principles or rules that should guide designers in order to achieve more positive outcomes for workers: 1. Earnings maximization, 2. Stability and predictability, 3. Transparency, 4. Portability of products and reputations, 5. Upskilling, 6. Social connectedness, 7. Bias elimination, 8. Feedback mechanisms (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms)
• Those of us who are striving to organize workers in the online economy have to build a theory for reputation portability and protection into our other organizing work (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)

11. Governments cannot remain spectators of the tremendous effects of centralized platforms

• “Cities and governments have not yet fully grasped that power lies, today, at the level of data” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• “The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits” (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• Many of the business models of the “sharing economy” are based on the strategic nullification of the law. Companies knowingly violate city regulations and labor laws. This allows them to undermine the competition and then point to a large customer base to demand legislative changes that benefit their dubious modus operandi. (Trebor Scholz—How Platform Cooperativism Can Unleash the Network)

12. Civil Society and Governments have to co-create an eco-system for Coop Plataforms to flourish

• “The big companies that rule the Internet aren’t coming to dominate just because of a good idea and a charismatic founder; they grow out of supportive ecosystems, including investors, lawyers, sympathetic governments, and tech schools. Perhaps most important is their culture—the festivals, the meetups, the memes, the manifestos—that share norms for what kinds of practices are expected and celebrated. To change these norms, we need to cultivate an ecosystem for platform cooperativism” (Editors -Showcase 2: Ecosystem)
• The scale of the transition to platform capitalism is massive. The builders of emerging online platforms aim to become pervasive across all productive sectors, and to permeate every level of society: the level of the individual (with smartphones and wearable technology, lenses, glasses); the level of the home (“smart homes,” smart power meters and Internet-connected sensors); and the level of “smart cities” (driverless cars, networked transportation services; energy grids, drones, ubiquitous digital services). Platforms are reshaping not just the Internet but the economy as a whole, and governments have a responsibility to ensure that this new economy serves more than the platform-builders’ profits. ( Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)

13. Some administrations are beginning to realize the potential of cooperative platforms, or at least allowing new opportunities for them to emerge.

• A very interesting example of a city that is putting forward alternative policies and forward-looking regulations is Barcelona. (Francesca Bria—Public Policies for Digital Sovereignty)
• The Securities and Exchange Commission has enacted new rules on crowdfunding, through the JOBS Act, that are opening up the ways that everyday people can invest in the companies that best align with their values. These new rules allow non-accredited investors to invest, and they also allow for investments to occur without the intervention of brokers. It has become easier, in this way, for us to be responsive to the people we hope to serve and partner with (Karen Gregory—Can Code Schools Go Cooperative?)

14 . Coop Platforms need initially both a core limited multi-skilled team and a wide community to succeed.

• I have found that innovation occurs most readily in small teams with shared goals but different skill sets. Big groups, on the other hand, are good for education and organizing work, and for refining existing platforms. But to innovate, I like to work in core teams of three to six people, as this allows for deep relationships, shared memory, and relatively fast decision making, since each person can speak for ten to twenty minutes per hour in meetings (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).
• If you can’t raise $300,000 a year for a core team of five, don’t build a demo site that barely works or buggy software that won’t last—organize great events and build community! (Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…).

15. In Coop Platforms terms, ownership is what matters.

• With less than 10 percent of Americans currently owning their own businesses and workplaces, today’s “new, new organizing” begins to address the skewed imbalances between capital and labor and the power this distortion produces and exercises (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Starting in the spring of 2014, 1worker1vote.org set out to demonstrate that widespread workplace equity and democratic participation can return America to its original system of individual and local community ownership (Michael Peck—Building the People’s Ownership Economy through Union Co-ops).
• Very few campaigns lead to what Hochschild calls “deep acting”—our genuine emotions at work. Most campaigns fall back on “surface acting,” the kind of behavior associated with fake smiles. These campaigns strain volunteers, scare supporters, and fail at their goals. And if a project does get funded, any future collective action depends on whoever owns and controls the value created. Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

16. Coop Platforms can offer a wide range of ownership/membership alternatives

• These DCOs are connected intellectually to a variety of related decentralized ownership models. They range from the FairShare Model of Karl Sjogren, which proposes a structure of different classes of ownership shares for different contributors—for founders, people with a continuous working role, for users, and for investors—to the Swarm approach to “crypto-equity” crowdfunding developed by Joel Dietz. If the rules for equitable value distribution are well defined, generally accepted, and become “normal” in the same way that employment for salary at a shareholder corporation was in the twentieth century, perhaps the providers can then focus more of their efforts on creating value (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership).

17. Coop Platforms will be developed more quickly if depart from what already exists, and traditional cooperativism and unionism experiment with it.

• It’s important for folks in the platform-cooperative community to understand that there are existing worker-led organizations that are set up to deal with multi-employer, disaggregated work situations—and that we can build from their model, rather than starting from scratch. (Kati Sipp—Portable Reputation in the On-Demand Economy)
• What both of these paths signify is the potential for value when organized labor and worker cooperatives team up in the “gig economy.” (Christoph Spehr—SpongeBob, Why Don’t You Work Harder?)
• Here is an often-overlooked challenge: try to join and add to existing cooperative platforms, rather than building your own from scratch.(Caroline Woolard—So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative…)
• As a movement, cooperativism will only succeed by moving fast and decisively, learning from the near past, and sharing our experiments and knowledge quickly and repeatedly in a network of cooperatives. (Yochai Benkler—The Realism of Cooperativism)

18. Platform Coops must put “humanizing” emotions into equation (and crowfunding efforts are examples of this).

• Elizabeth Hoffman’s 2016 study of worker co-ops found that embracing emotion ultimately benefits democratic participation. As individuals get comfortable expressing themselves, they develop an identity as co-owners—their workplace and co-workers feel like “home” and “family.” Such transformative, humanizing experiences contrast with how we relate to one another through marketing. These are also how investment grows into stewardship. (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).
• Without emotional investment in a cooperative arrangement, campaigns run the risk of ruining relationships over unmet expectations. For crowdfunding to become stewardship, we need rolling barn-raisers—regular activities in which guests can co-create with the gifts they bring, celebrate their accomplishments, and build again. Marketing strategies extract generosity by developing an audience, message, and call-to-action, leveraging one-way relationships. A barn-raiser is an organizing strategy for a cooperative alternative that involves people, invitation, and engagement (think p-i-e): 1) Connect with people. Audiences are passive, but people put emotion at the core of cooperation. Learn who might join the effort, and what they’re trying to get done. 2) Make an invitation. Messages are static, but invitations cultivate voluntary and open membership. Define what you want to celebrate, together—in person or online. 3) Sustain engagement. A call-to-action limits inputs, but engagement supports democratic ownership and control. Seek participation more than financial contributions (Danny Spitzberg—How Crowdfunding Becomes Stewardship).

19. Traditional Coops may be in a privileged position for building Coop Platforms, but they have to understand the power of commons first.

• In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting, or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena is left open to be dominated by large corporations

20. The best Platform Coops could be envisioned as infrastructures for Open Value Networks built over “natural abundance”

• “In a natural extension of such capacities, open value networks, or OVNs, are attempts to enable bounded networks of participants to carry out crowdfunding, crowdsourcing of knowledge, and co-budgeting among their identifiable participants. OVNs such as Enspiral and Sensorica have been described as an “operating system for a new kind of organization” and a “pilot project for the new economy.” (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity […] Open cooperatives, in comparison, recognize natural abundance and refuse to generate revenue by making abundant resources artificially scarce. […] Second, a typical commons-based peer production project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute […] Open co-ops, therefore, practice open-value accounting or contributory accounting […] Third, open cooperatives can secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “CopyFair” licenses. […] Fourth, open cooperatives are able to make use of open designs to produce sustainable goods and services […] Fifth, and relatedly, open cooperatives reduce waste [… ]Sixth, open cooperatives can mutualize not only digital infrastructures but also physical ones (Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis—Why Platform Co-ops Should Be Open Co-ops).

21. Governance of Platform Coops, Open Value Networks and commons requires a distinctive set of management practices

• 1) Find the right people, 2) Explore different strategies for self-management, 3) Consider conversion, 4) Define the parameters of your cooperative environment, 5) Join a cooperative network (or two), 6) Invest in other cooperatives, 7) Choose free tools to run the business. (Micky Metts—Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Tech Co-op)
• Our Good Work Code is a set of eight simple principles that can serve as a framework: 1) Safety, 2) Stability & Flexibility, 3) Transparency, 4) Shared Prosperity, 5) A Livable Wage, 6) Inclusion & Input, 7) Support & Connection, 8)Growth & Development (Palak Shah—A Code for Good Work).
• We considered the following six interrelated factors as determinants and drivers of commons governance: 1) Mission 2) Management of contributions. Greater flexibility of participants seems to be conducive to higher degrees of contribution. 3) Decision-making with regard to community interaction. Consensus-based decision making is frequent in commons-based peer production but the methods differ. 4) Formal policies applied to community interaction. 5) Design of the platform. 6) Platform provision (Mayo Fuster Morell—Toward a Theory of Value for Platform Cooperatives)

22. Blockchain technologies could actually be an opportunity for Coop Platforms, but should not be used for promoting cooperation without trust.

• Although Bitcoin itself has been designed to serve familiar capitalist functions (tax avoidance, private accumulation through speculation), the blockchain ledger is significant because it can enable highly reliable, versatile forms of collective action on open networks. It does this by validating the authenticity of a digital object (for example, a bitcoin) without the need for a third-party guarantor such as a bank or government body. This solves a particularly difficult collective-action problem in an open network context: How do you know that a given digital object—a bitcoin, a legal document, digital certificate, dataset, a vote, or a digital identity asserted by an individual—is the real thing and not a forgery? (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons)
• In the United States, former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt has proposed using blockchain technology to create distributed networks of solar power on residential houses coordinated as commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• This field of experimentation may yield another breakthrough tool for forging digital commons: smart contracts. […] These transactions could, of course, be used to invent new types of markets, but they also could be used to create new types of commons (David Bollier—From Open Access to Digital Commons).
• Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will (Rachel O’Dwyer—Blockchains and Their Pitfalls).

23. Those that want to build a Coop Platform should get rid of mainstream mindsets

• Cooperatives tended to focus too much on how the value would be shared rather than on a compelling offer to create the value in the first place (Arun Sundararajan—Economic Barriers and Enablers of Distributed Ownership)
• We embed values into our technologies, and today such values are reflections of Silicon Valley’s ethos and funding models (Marina Gorbis—Designing Positive Platforms).
• Platforms don’t need to be treated as commodities: It’s easy to develop a platform fetish as a result of their seemingly magical potential to create billionaires. Yet all along, it is the users themselves, and the rents they pay to platform companies, that enable the billion-dollar valuations (Janelle Orsi—Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative)

24.There are plenty of experiences to learn from that are documented in the book. Far too many to pick excerpts. Get the book and read it.

Photo by arbyreed

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These questions framed the opening of an event with Nathan Schneider, journalist, author, co-convenor of the first platform cooperativism conference (NYC) and professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Nathan’s visit to Australia was capped off by a workshop in Melbourne Australia on 10th June 2016 called ‘Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy’.

Nathan Schneider began with his keynote on the transformative power of an Internet that we can co-own and co-govern together. From Nathan’s introduction: “we are in a period of transition to a platform society one in which we carry out the economy less from fixed workplaces and more through tools of connection – an infrastructure of online tools that enable us to connect with each other and create value together. We are moving from an economy which has this cool toy called the Internet to the Internet orchestrating this cool toy called the economy. One of the features of it, is continuing a pattern the offline industrial economy has been following in recent years. We’re seeing this continued process in this online platform economy, in which we are increasingly disconnected from the benefits of the very economy we’re creating.”

Sharing Value and Ownership for the Common Good, Church of All Nations, Melbourne Australia.

Nathan continues: “In the wake of the economic crisis there’s been this urge to share, the sharing economy. Wouldn’t we all love to share the stuff that we all have too much of, like cars and housing and all this stuff. This energised a lot of young people to take part in a positive new economy. But then, there started to be some cracks. We start to see workers with very little security in the context of what’s called a ‘sharing economy’. We start to realize that what we’re doing is not so much sharing as micro-rental all the time and that nothing is being shared in this process. Instead the profits are being directed to a very centralized organization. And these companies in the so-called sharing economy have a shocking disregard for the public good. We have a choice between this really positive vision of the liberated freelancer, people who control their working hours and don’t have to have the same job to control their security for the rest of their life. But then there’s also this vision of the precariat, who loses control over work and has to deal with a completely unaccountable global corporation that has no interest in their interest.”

Nathan Schneider asks: “what can we say yes to?”

Nathan on the cooperative platform economy: “This leaves us with a question. There’s lots of good stuff and there’s lots of bad stuff. So what can we say yes to? In a lot of cities around the world it often feels like those in government have to say no to this emerging platform economy and they don’t seem to have a lot of choices about what they can say yes to, what they can encourage. One of the ways to think about what we’re doing when we talk about a cooperative online economy is creating a choice, a choice that’s actually worth having. What if there were a real sharing economy? Fortunately there are some pretty good precedents to draw on. Alongside the development of industrial capitalism has been this vision of a cooperative economy, and practice of a cooperative economy, that has thrived around the world in many industries through open membership, democratic control and ownership, shared profits, autonomy, and a deep concern for community. This is a tradition that has spread and I think more than many of us even recognize because it’s not something that we learn about in school very often, or that’s talked about in public debate, but this is a very powerful and widespread sector of the global economy, and it’s a source that we can draw upon. If we’re talking about a sharing economy, this is the gold standard, the co-operative economy. Meanwhile we can also draw on practices that have developed from tech culture that contribute to and develop the tradition of co-operative enterprize.”

Nathan’s keynote presentation can be heard in full here.

A great overview of ‘Building the Commons Economy’ by @PaulaSgherza

A panel of local innovators including Serenity Hill (Open Food Network), Eric Doriean (AnyShare) and Antony McMullen (Employee Ownership Australia and New Zealand) came together with Nathan to discuss how the Commons Economy is taking shape in Australia. The panel discussion can be heard here.

Panel featuring Nathan Schneider, Serenity Hill, Eric Doriean, Antony McMullen and Darren Sharp.

The second half of the event was a Design Lab facilitated by co-convener Jose Ramos for AbilityMate, a Sydney-based social enterprise creating affordable assistive devices for people with a disablity using open design and 3D printing. The Design Lab was run to help co-founders Mel Fuller and Johan du Plessis and designer Kin Ly collaboratively workshop ideas in development and seek fedback from fellow practitioners related to funding and scaling their social enterprise.

Jose Ramos introducing Kin, Johan and Mel from AbilityMate.

Human-centred design was used to understand the key design challenges (pain points) faced by AbilityMate, identify opportunity areas and create a series of how might we questions used for brainstorming and ideation.

Seminar participants were given three How Might We Questions to brainstorm together in small groups:

1. How might we attract and scale investment from $500,000 in 2 years to $30 million in 4 years, while maintaining co-op principles of equal voting power and fair return on investment? (There are constraints around equity crowd funding in Australia. If an entity has more than 50 shareholders that aren’t employees it has to be publicly listed, which has very onerous protocols and tax implications).
2. How might we use the cooperative model to both support AbilityMate’s social impact mission and remain globally competitive (access to capital, markets, customers and speed)?
3. How might we run and find funding to test an AbilityMate platform co-op trial which includes investors, employees, customers and founders in order to validate/prove the benefits of platform co-ops?

The Design Lab group presentations can be heard in full here.

Design Lab with AbilityMate on converting to a platform co-operative.

This event was part of a global conversation about the future of value, ownership and governance in the emerging platform economy. The Melbourne workshop explored how social enterprizes like AbilityMate can become platform co-ops and developed practical ideas for how ventures can attract investment and support while maintaining their social mission. These discussions are relevant to any organization developing commons-based solutions to ensure that prosperity and decision-making can be shared between value creators working together for mutual benefit and the transition to a more equitable platform economy.

Nathan’s Australian visit also included a public seminar on platform cooperativism at ACMI in Melbourne with Janelle Orsi on 7th June.

I look forward to sharing details of Australia’s evolving cooperative platform ecosystem at the second platform cooperativism conference being held in New York 11-13 November.

Photo by aKs_phOtOs (Pixabay)

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The spec could be something like this:

+ Groups could easily create a Pool, which is a Delaware LLC with co-op-like, boiler-plate bylaws, such as shared ownership among members, shared investment, commitment to social good, etc. It could also be a legal co-op somewhere if we can find the right jurisdiction. Maybe the membership of the main group wouldn’t be the same as its Pool—some additional investment or commitment might be required—or maybe it would be.

+ Using tools like Loomio and/or CoBudget, members of the Pool could make proposals and vote on decisions about what to do with the funds they pool. Groups could decide what the threshold for a decision is as part of a small set of variables in the back-end. But the principle of one-person-one-vote would be hardwired.

+ Pools could be modular swarms, making it easy to combine or disconnect around projects of shared interest—call them Floods. Together, they could use the decision-making tools to determine how to use their combined resources. This way, lots of these mini co-ops could federate and cooperate.

A result of this is that lots and lots of people could quickly become cooperativists without necessarily gulping down lots of co-op ideology. It’d be a simple, obvious way of funding group projects. And this in itself would have huge educational effect; it would demonstrate how practical and easy democratic resource-management can be.

Does this idea hold water, so to speak? What is it missing? What would be needed to make it work?

Cross-posted from the Internet of Ownership. Go to the original post to read a follow-up discussion on the comments.

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