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

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

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

Table 1: Desirable approach for risk and care management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Table 4: Approach to Platform Decisions

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

• Opening, opening, opening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• It should organize the consultations to stakeholders.

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

• It should serve as arbitrator of stakeholders’ disputes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the following canvases:

• The Ecoopsystem Idea Tester (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Exploration (draft)

• The Ecoopsystem Sustainability Matrix (draft)

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

Goteo is a complex entity, how would you describe yourselves?

Smart Citizen kit – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo

Goteo is a collective that tries to promote participation and collaboration between institutions and citizens. With the Goteo platform, we help create stories through tools, merge them together and grow them; on the other hand, we also generate communities around initiatives. We work on bringing together individuals and public institutions to “collaborate forward,” for example, by opening up the institutional processes of participation or distributing funding evenly and in a more participatory way. We also track different organisational and development systems, including new funding models. More precisely, Goteo is a platform for crowdfunding campaigns, but it is not limited to funding: it also involves crowdsourcing. We do not only help our partners in acquiring the funds to carry a project on, but also in collecting non-economic contributions that a community can help with, and in sharing open-sourced collective benefits for the community, allowing projects to be replicated, reused, disseminated, or even improved or copied for further uses.

What makes the platform specific?

What is unique about Goteo is that we push for open source resources, collective initiatives, and we promote sharing collective benefits after a project passes through our crowdfunding campaign. We ask campaign promoters to publish their digital resources in an open source way once the campaign is over. It means sharing open source licenses, whether it’s a code or a design, a manual or any kind of file that shows the project. It is important for us to think of how this process contributes to the city and to the urban movement of gathering collective resources: we believe that it is an interesting way of putting clusters in movement.

Why so much emphasis on open-source?

We think that when you ask for support from a community, you should give something back. If you are an artist asking for funding for a CD, you should publish your CD with a creative common license or other free licenses afterwards, and give it back to the community. By doing so, we are also helping expand knowledge and provide access to free knowledge at a time when many forces are trying to enclose knowledge. The pressure on knowledge is similar to the pressure on social centres that are trying to resist enclosure.

Isn’t open source a constraint for the projects that run campaigns on your platform?

We really trust that the more open your project becomes, the more it attracts, the more it creates and the bigger it grows. That’s why we always push for the open licensing of the products and projects we support, and their outcomes – and that’s also why our platform itself is open source. You can download and copy the code of our platform, and have your own crowdfunding platform, use it, share it, improve it. We call this crowdfunding with crowd impact and crowd benefits. Goteo in Spanish means “leak”, and that’s how a campaign grows successful, drop by drop. Like the way you irrigate a garden: we understand that a way of funding collectively means that every drop adds to whatever you need to complete the watering of your garden.

How do the events you organise connect to the crowdfunding activities?

We believe that open knowledge creates more open knowledge, this is why we conduct workshops and bring together communities to cross-feed each other. Over 2000 people have come to our workshops, from many different countries and contexts: some apply the new ideas they gathered to urbanism, some to culture management, others to technology as well as many other fields. When you add layers to a project or invite different ideas to engage in dialogue with their counterparts, you can grow together and create more successful projects.

We always ask if crowdfunding is compatible with crowd benefits. People who prepare crowdfunding campaigns, ask us, “Do you think this is viable, do you think this feasible, do you think I can go through with it or is it something that is not going to be successful?” When we assess the project, we look for two ways of rewarding, not only the individuals who support the project, but also the community.
We divide rewards into two different groups: one consists of individual rewards, referring to when a person supports the project with 20 euros, and receives a postcard, a copy of your disk or participation in your workshop. The other refers to collective incentives that are more important for us, to push the community to support a project and add social importance to it. When something feels important and adds value to society, it is likely that more people will support and engage with it.

How do you define crowd benefits?

When we consider a project, we always ask promoters about their own experience, details, facts and issues of their projects that can help them conduct their projects in a better way. We ask about their needs. Of course, all projects in the fields of culture, urbanism and architecture need money. If there are no financial resources available, we look for alternative ways to support the project. We also ask about the tasks to be carried out, the infrastructures that they own, can count on or need and an outline of the materials needed for the project. Based on these, we assess what rewards one is able to give back to the community. Collective benefits can be digital archives, manual guides, codes, apps, websites or designs that can be downloaded, copied and adapted to the needs.

How can you help projects?

When gathering a group of people around a project, some might donate money while others might have important contributions that are not of a monetary nature. We promote our partners to also share their non-monetary needs in their communities. Projects often need a van to move things, or a translation. We have a feature on our platform to exchange these possible means of cooperation. We feel that when people get together and get to know each other and their projects, it is also easier to engage them and create community through social networks.

On average, around 200 people support each project, with contributions that range from 20 euros to 1500 or with their skills. 70% of our crowdfunding campaigns are successful, and one of every three donors does not want anything in return, they are donating because they value the project. We believe it is possible to talk about the culture of generosity in a world where we are constantly told that we have to be individuals, and we have to make it ourselves, be self-made men. We believe instead that the culture of generosity is really at our core, in our heart.

How do you define how much money is obtainable with a crowdfunding campaign?

Spain in Flames – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo

We always establish two different budget goals for campaigns: there is a minimum which we consider the project needs just to kickstart, and then there is an optimum budget that could take the project further. We do respect the numbers identified by the promoters themselves, because they know more than anyone else about their needs and the costs in their local contexts, but we keep an eye on budget requests to make sure that what they ask for is clear and the plan is coherent. We suggest to keep the projected budgets at the right scale and advise initiators to make their budgets transparent and modular: if a project needs 10.000 euros, what budget categories does it include? Once initiators understand their own budget better, they often realise that some their needs can be covered with existing infrastructure or non-monetary contributions. Another criteria for projecting budget is an initiative’s capacity of social outreach: if an organisation has never disseminated anything in social media, or the initiator is an individual with limited online engagement, it might be better to keep the projected budget low. To this, we add another specific layer of knowledge about what different people from random places can do in areas that are not necessarily on our minds, for instance, in rural areas. We are generally very much focused on cities, but there are interesting initiatives in rural areas that contribute to the commons.

What is your experience about campaigns that addressed development or construction projects?

We had several campaigns in the fields of urbanism and architecture: they give us insights on how to facilitate different behaviours in urban and rural areas and how to share knowledge among communities that were previously not in touch. For instance, La Fabrika de Toda la Vida is an initiative using a former cement factory in Extremadura, not far from the Portuguese border: they financed their start-up phase, the rebuilding of a part of an enormous factory, with a successful crowdfunding campaign through Goteo, they raised 133% of their minimum budget. Their offer to give back to society was the building itself: they turned it into an open space that anyone can use and suggest activities for.

Another example is the Instituto Do It Yourself: it is a knowledge hub, an infrastructure that helps people exchange knowledge in a peripheral neighbourhood of Madrid. The Institute was started in 2013; it is a nice example of a free knowledge resource, established with the help of a campaign we launched together. There are also journalism projects we supported that are closely linked with urbanism. For instance, Goteo supported a campaign for a research on land use in Galicia, Northern Spain, where wildfires are closely connected to speculation: the devastation caused by wildfires usually opens the way for changing land use and building more profitable buildings on formerly agricultural land. Another project is the Smart Citizen Kit, built with open-source Arduino hardware to be installed in your home. The kit monitors air quality and sends data to a centralised device that collects data from different parts of a city.

The Social Coin – campaign run on Goteo. Image (c) Goteo

How do your campaigns contribute to the creation of a more collaborative tissue of community initiatives?

Processes through our platform turn out to be barometers of what a more collaborative and ethical society could become through implementing more open source collaborative processes and programs. For instance, some projects deal with cooperation in a larger sense. One of the initiatives produced a set of coins, kind of tokens, for collectives, companies of big groups to measure their collaborations: a way to visualise a chain of favours, to highlight how non-monetary contributions and collaborations function within a team or among several teams.

What are the overall results of the platform?

In six years, we collected over 5,7 million euros altogether, with an average contribution of 50 euros, and with over 496,000 euros in match funding. At stats.goteo.org, the platform has open data about our campaigns: it shows tendencies, categories, money collected for each project, and the time it takes a project to collect the necessary funding. We also developed an app with which people can freely use the data. Tracking accountability is very important for us: the more we know about a project we support, the more vigilant we can be in what they do, and also receive better outcomes from them.

Do public institutions play any role in your campaigns?

It is an important issue. Some people would say, “All right, crowdfunding is nice, and so are the collective benefits, but we are exploiting our families, our friends, communities and ourselves just to extract more money from them for our projects. Isn’t it a bit contradictory, doesn’t it promote the notion of ‘Big Society’ advocated by conservative ideologues?” We’re aware of this and work on attracting private and public money, to balance contributions to the projects we support: we work on many of our funding processes with private companies as well as with different local and regional public administrations and universities.

From crowdfunding to crowdadvocacy guidebook. Image (c) Goteo

In the past years, we have been working with various public administrations, and they would agree to add some budget to specific calls, match funding a set of campaigns selected by an open panel including public officials and our team with 10,000 or 96,000 euros. These are projects that go through crowdfunding campaigns, but public institutions double the amount given by citizens; so for each euro made through crowdfunding, the administration offers another euro. It is a way to open the process of decision-making: there are initiatives that institutions would not fund without collective support.

La Fabrika de Toda la Vida for instance, was also supported by the regional government’s match funding. At the time, the conservative government of the Estremadura region would probably have not understood what it meant to restore a former factory in a village; but with the support shown to the project by other institutions, the citizens and us, they realised that it was intelligent to invest in a project like this.

Our cooperation with public institutions is not exclusively monetary. Lately we have been working with public institutions, for instance with different municipalities in Barcelona and elsewhere, on how they are developing their participatory processes, their policy-making, and on how they can engage their citizens and promote more open and meaningful decision-making processes. This is a horizon that we have: we are looking for growing alliances between public and private actors to raise funding for citizen projects, soon at a much larger scale than today.

This text in an excerpt from the book Funding the Cooperative City: Community finance and the economy of civic spaces. Figures have been updated in February 2018 to reflect Goteo’s progress.

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Hacktivism + crowdfunding + wide social collaboration

= the building of new commons

Each of these activities has always existed separately, of course, but it was the vision of Goteo to integrate them into a single open network that is helping commoners build a new Commons Sector in society. With more than 50,000 users and more than 2 million euros raised since 2012, Goteo has helped launch more than 400 projects that support the commons, open code and free knowledge. The projects span a rich variety of fields – education, the environment, technology, culture, entrepreneurial startups, journalism and more.¹ Among them:

The Smart Citizen kit, an open source environmental monitoring platform and hardware for citizens to open and share their own environmental data;²

Quién Manda, a collaborative mapping project that depicts political and economic power relations in Spain;³

Open source gasifier, a renewable electricity generator using residual biomass gasification in the Republic of Chad;⁴

Nodo Móvil, a replicable, travelling wifi connection unit for communities, social movements and public spaces;⁵

Spain in Flames, an open data website to allow the visualization of forest fires, their causes and solutions, enhanced with data from investigative reporting;⁶

Foldarapa, a compact, foldable 3D printer made by a community using a P2P distributed production model that helps its users expand production while sharing the profit with others;⁷ and

The Social Market, a cooperative project by the Spanish Alternative and Solidarity Network linking more than 230 companies and others committed to solidarity economy values.⁸

Goteo is more than a platform for crowdfunding. It serves as a focal point for distributed collaboration among strangers, each of whom may have something special – physical resources, expertise, infrastructure tools, personal time – to contribute to a particular project. Goteo doesn’t just engage individuals; it has become a network of local, independent communities throughout Spain. These range from one in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by the Basque government, to others in Andalusia and Barcelona.

The people who belong to the Goteo network tend to play different roles at various times. They may introduce a new project that needs support, contribute funds to help launch a project, or collaborate on it so that it can grow.

Goteo had its origins in the Platoniq collective⁹ – a Barcelona-based group that was a pioneer in the production and distribution of copyleft culture.¹⁰  The hackers of Platoniq (including me) were passionate about designing tools for citizen empowerment and social innovation. We mostly used open source, peer-to-peer technologies that can be easily adapted and reproduced.

Some of Platoniq’s projects became quite famous. Burn Station (2004) was a mobile, self-service system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge – all of it legally under a Creative Commons license.¹¹This “taking the Internet to the streets” initiative gained worldwide attention. Another project, The Bank of Common Knowledge, was a series of gatherings in different cities that provided open workshops and manuals.¹² Thanks to hundreds of volunteers, people could learn how to install and use a wiki, how to repair domestic technologies, how to set up a free wifi network, how to set up a local consumer group.¹³

In these and other hackathon-like events Platoniq also served a “process medium” or “masters of ceremonies” for technology-based projects. It helped developers and entrepreneurs recruit new collaborators, clarify the problems to be solved, choose the superior body of source code for projects, and develop alliances in moving them forward.

Despite the success of Platoniq’s work, it became painfully clear after several years that there was a serious lack of resources to incubate innovative and experimental projects. This need was especially acute for projects based on open source and commons-based principles. Neither public nor private institutions are generally eager to support such projects, and certainly conventional market players see little gain in helping produce innovations that are designed to be copied and shared.

The rise of crowdfunding in 2009 as a new model of digital collaboration began to open up a new field of possibilities, however. It became evident from such early platforms like Kickstarter that distributed funding from hundreds and even thousands of people could be a feasible base of support. The standard crowdfunding process at the time consisted of a specific fundraising goal, a deadline for pledges, an “all or nothing” scheme (sufficient pledges to meet the goal or no funding), and a system of individual rewards or perks for backers.

Some of the participants in Platoniq, especially Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum, decided to investigate the possibilities. They found that backers of open source projects were on average more generous than backers of other projects, and that they also contributed more regularly. Platoniq also explored the subtleties of other distributed systems for raising money online – the microcredits approach used by Kiva and platforms for lending money to entrepreneurs – as well as alliances with local organizations in smaller countries. In the end, we decided that it was time to invent a new platform for funding innovations that contribute to open knowledge and the commons.

Since we couldn’t identify any single project or tool designed to support the logic of sharing, collaborating and social impact, we decided to invent one – Goteo. From the start it was a collaborative endeavor. Before programming a single line of code, we entered into a lengthy period of codesign in which we consulted with communities of practice, cultural agitators, open source practitioners, designers, academics and others. We asked the potential users to help visualize the new crowdfunding platform and suggest features that could better meet their own needs and experiences.

Goteo was launched at the end of 2011 as the first crowdfunding platform expressly for open and commons-oriented projects. Its design embodied the following values, in order of importance:

Collective return: Aside from individual rewards for backers, the final outputs of any initiative using Goteo must contribute to the commons. For example, projects must use licenses that allow copying, sharing, modification and free use of part or the whole of each created work.

Trustworthy management model: The legal organization that manages Goteo is a nonprofit foundation, Fundación Fuentes Abiertas, which is officially recognized as a public-interest organization. This management model offers tax-deductible benefits for both cofinancers and promoters.

Fostering transparency: Each project must give specific details about where the money collected will go. Coupled with a two-round scheme of fundraising, this requirement means that even very successful campaigns disclose the actual use of money obtained, including extra money beyond the stated goal. Furthermore, Goteo and project promoters both sign a legal agreement that guarantees that the work described in the crowdfunding campaigns – products, services, activities, archives, etc. – are actually produced.

Distributed collaboration: Beyond monetary contributions to projects via Goteo, people are invited to collaborate in the development of projects by offering services, material resources and infrastructure. They can also participate in specific microtasks.

Training: Goteo has advised and trained more than 2,000 people from many domains through dozens of workshops – a commitment that both disseminates our knowledge while building Goteo’s social following and economic stability.

Community of local nodes: Goteo is not a centralized hub, but more of a community of communities – a network of local, independent nodes that serve to localize projects and give them context. The first one started in the Spanish region of the Basque country, supported by Basque government, and a second later began in Andalusia. New ones will soon be launched in Barcelona and in Nantes, France.

Public/private match-funding: Goteo is a pioneer in recruiting public/private capital investors to help develop open culture projects through a bottom-up process in a “cloudfunding capital” process: each euro a project receives from a person is matched by another euro from institutions belonging to a social investment fund.

Open source: The core software code of the Goteo website is freely available under a General Public License 3.0 via GitHub, which ensures that it can be used and improved via open source principles.

Goteo’s organizational design principles and values mean that its crowdfunding processes are more rule-based than others. It takes more work to ensure that proposed projects comply with basic criteria of openness and commons principles; that projects are actually produced as promised; and that the collective rewards are delivered and made accessible.

But with tens of thousands of users and a 70 percent rate of success for all proposed projects (the majority of crowdfunding platforms rarely reach a 40 percent), we are convinced that Goteo is headed in the right direction. Its success has validated new standards of openness in crowdfunding, and it has attracted some of the most compelling innovators in the field. Although it is difficult to measure, Goteo has also contributed significantly to projects in free culture, open source code and the commons that might otherwise never materialize.

Goteo aspires to somehow “close the circle” with its previous experiences with Platoniq by developing new forms of peer-to-peer creation, crowd incubation and development for projects in the stages before and after crowdfunding. That will have to wait for a while as we concentrate on Goteo’s first priority, to finance and consolidate the Commons Sector.

Enric Senabre Hidalgo (Spain) is currently a member of Dimmons Research Group (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute – UOC), and a visiting Fellow at the CECAN research centre (University of Surrey). He’s a researcher working on co-design methodologies and Agile frameworks for research processes and the development of digital Commons. Previously, he was member of the Platoniq collective, co-founder and project manager of the platform Goteo.org for civic crowdfunding. He is also vice president of the Observatory for CyberSociety and teaches Software Studies and the History of Digital Culture at the Open University of Catalonia, where he holds a Master’s Degree in the Information and Knowledge Society.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Medialab Prado

Photo by Ars Electronica

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