Jonny Gordon-Farleigh: Stocksy United is a stock photography multistakeholder co-operative launched in 2013. This was a return to the sector after having been part of iStock, another stock photography provider. You initially considered setting up a trust, but opted for the co-operative model instead. Could you explain the decision to set up a co-operative?

Brianna Wettlaufer: After coming back into the sector, our goal was to put power back into the hands of artists. It was about giving people the control over their careers that had been lost at companies who were bullying them, where they had no rights over how their images were being sold, and were seeing their revenues clawed back. It was about the whole question of artistic integrity, which is an offshoot of the health of the community. Our goal was to bring that back into the fold, which existed in the early days of iStock but, as it scaled and was bought by Getty Images, was lost as priorities changed.

So knowing that we wanted to do that, we looked at nonprofits and a series of other business models. But at the end of the day, the co-operative model answered all of the questions. And with the legal background to ensure that we made these things happen, it wasn’t a long period of time for us to realise that it was the solution for our organisation. I think as Canadians we are more culturally aware of the model and Canadian laws are a bit easier to adapt for an online tech company.

JGF: Your co-operative has three membership classes: founders, staff and artists. What rights do these individual classes have within a multistakeholder co-op?

BW:  Class A is founders, and also our advisors. This class is a maximum of five people, and right now we have three people. Their purpose is high-level business operations. Class B is staff, capped at 20 presently, with all positions filled.

JGF: Why are they capped?

Nuno Silva: It was determined by the original by-laws. When we were deciding on how many shares to issue for each class, we had to put a number to it. So when we first started, 20 seemed like a reasonable number.

BW: Honestly, there is not much difference between the rights of each class, basically the class indicates the level at which they are giving guidance to the organisation. 90% of the dividends is awarded to Class C, and 5% goes to Class A and Class B. Currently, it is divided equally. It is pretty simple. Overall, it is pretty simple in terms of our governance.

Class A, currently, is Bruce Livingstone, a co-founder, Brent Nelson, another co-founder. Many of us have worked together as experts in our domain for a really long time. In terms of governance for the company, it is a very close collaboration. There are not many gaps or surprises, where people are having to do resolutions to correct the course that we’re on. We want to make sure everyone is being heard in the company, so everyone feels good about the decisions we’re making, having additional governance laws or different laws about participation, doesn’t make any sense as it just creates more bureaucracy, which we are working really hard to avoid as we scale.

JGF: Multistakeholder models are becoming more popular, but more stakeholders means more governance costs, potential delays, and difficulties. How do you manage stakeholder participation so that it is both meaningful and also allows you to remain competitive?

BW: It has definitely been a process, and we’re still trying to find the right balance. We take the ethos of being a co-operative very seriously—empowering everyone from the inside out and ensuring that we’re being transparent and collaborative. But when you take that to too much of an extreme, not only is not functional, it is not enjoyable for the people in the organisation. We’ve found that it is one thing to empower people in what they’re doing, and another thing to expect everyone to operate at an executive level and carry around the stress that comes with that position—to be expected to come up with ideas and solutions, when it is not what they are particularly interested in doing.

There is nothing wrong with people focusing on their jobs, or particular areas. So our goal is that those within the organisation can provide enough research and information to justify the decisions we make for the business, so we’re transparent as possible, identifying why and what we’re doing, and the reasons for the solutions we propose.

So moving forward that’s the platform we want, constantly asking the membership if there is anything we missed, then integrating their feedback. Our priority is maintaining an open conversation, but not so democratic that it is not functional across the different skillsets of how we lead the company, or being blocked by a vote-by-committee approach We keep everyone involved, and by doing that, if there is a difference of opinion, it builds this constant trust between those involved. As we scale, we’re trying to figure out how to make these conversations more meaningful again, trying to segment the groups we’re engaging, the process of how we bring out new features on our website, and how we bring people into the testing process to support its refinement and adaptation.

NS: One advantage of having artists as co-owners means we can be really transparent. We don’t have to hide information from our members, we can release financial data, we can talk about confidential contract negotiations, we can get them involved from very early stages, open the books to them so they can have educated and informed responses. Whereas, if were a private company we would be much more guarded about the information we share with the artists. Thankfully we don’t have to do this.

Illustration by Nick Taylor

JGF: A private company’s executives have the right to sell the company. Within your co-op, what control and rights does Class C have over a possible future sale?

BW: For us to move forward with a sale, it would have to go through a resolution process and be agreed on by the members. Full Stop.

You spoke about your background in the private sector. How much has it informed and enabled the business development of your co-op?

BW:  We are really lucky with the team that started Stocksy, bringing around 15 years experience in specialised areas. We had the developer who originally built iStock, we have marketing experience, and business development. All of us share the experience of knowing how to grow companies in the private sector into profitable companies, but all of us want to do that with about being horrible, or evil, and selling people out. I think that’s a big reason why we’ve been able to get traction so far, is that experience, but using it to support people.

JGF: You’ve said that being a co-op is a secondary, if not tertiary, reason why photographers apply to become members of Stocksy. This obviously means that Stocksy has developed a financially rewarding business model. But beyond better remuneration, what other advantages are there to being a member of the co-op for your photographers?

BW: I think as a whole, people want to work with companies that they can believe in, and feel good about working with. So that’s being able to trust the company we’re working with, its having access to ownership and opportunities for collaboration, knowing how the business runs. For artists it is knowing that they will also be treated as people, as individuals, that is really important. Second to that, the health of our community, and the inspiration and mentorship that follows from it. It is that we are always looking to create the best work we possibly can, which can sometimes be demotivating: ‘I can’t hit this bar, it is too high’, but when you hit it, you are really happy and you are doing it with a group of people who are likeminded and wanting to do great things. Basically, all the healthy things you look for in a career.

JGF: Do you think the quality of the community within the co-operative has enhanced the business?

BW: Definitely. I’ve been working with companies for the last 15 years where the underpinning of the product is the community. But 15 years ago, as Friendster and Facebook were just getting traction, there wasn’t value in communities, there was value in address books. But the approach or attitude towards communities was that they were just a lot to manage, an annoyance almost.

I came out of the community to work at iStock, so I’ve been on the other side. If you don’t have a healthy community working with you, you don’t have a product. And you have a PR nightmare!

JGF: Voting rights are an important part of workplace democracy, and you’ve developed your own platform for members to discuss and vote on proposals. With Loomio now being used by city governments and other institutions, tools that enable distributed group voting are obviously becoming more important. What is your experience of working with a distributed virtual membership and how might it inform others working on these scales?

BW: I don’t think we’ve nailed it yet, and there is still a long way to go. Our platform is still the same as the day we launched, it is very basic but following that, I wouldn’t worry too much about the quality of the tools you are using, as long as they do the things you need: a place for people to talk, a place for your co-op to distribute information, to participate and vote on the direction of the business. Overall, we’ve relied less on the resolution and voting features, despite taking the time to custom build one, because we spend a lot of time in the forums talking to people. Since we’re having a constant conversation with members and doing our best, any business move we suggest that affects them financially or the direction of the business, we ensure we educate members about why we’re proposing it. The resolution and voting tool doesn’t actually need to be there if you’re listening to members on a daily basis and integrating it into your decisions.

You can spend way too much time and money trying to make the perfect tool, when it is really about the quality of conversation on whatever platform you decide to use.

NS: We explored lots of third-party software, like Loomio, and while it is a great product, it had a lot of features that we just didn’t need. In our baked-in product, the product we developed, coupled with our forums, it was good enough for the immediate problems we were trying to solve. If we decide to make it more complicated, we might look elsewhere, but as Brianna said, having open conversations on a simple platform has been the most effective.

JGF: What have been the most challenging proposals?

BW: The membership cap. And we still don’t have a solution here. We proposed creating a non-membership class, but even though it had a majority vote, after going to many co-operative events, we were told it was a very frequent mistake being made by co-ops, as you’re introducing classes for how to treat people, and is the antithesis of being a co-operative. So we had to go back to the membership and say, we thought this might be the answer, but this is often what seems like an easy solution, it is not, and we don’t think we should move forward with this proposal. And it is not sure what we should do next.

NS It was hotly debated within the community, from both sides. And we did have a majority vote as Brianna says, but it wasn’t unanimous, and there were many people who were very vocal against the proposal, so it gave us pause to consider that there might be a better way to approach the issue and a new vote to be considered.

JGF: How many proposal come from each class? Is there a good mix?

BW: No! No resolutions have come out of Class A. With Class B there have been some exploratory things of crossover in multiple classes, that they’ve had to put to a proposal. But in terms of direction of the company, they’re coming from Class C. Last year, I think we had about 20 proposals.

We’ve tried to make the resolution process work for us, too. At one point we brought in some external advisors who were trained in Italy. They reviewed all of the resolutions and rejected them all—these aren’t resolutions. That was horrible for the community. So if all of our resolutions are not meeting a resolution expectation, then we need to adapt how we’re receiving this feedback, so we’ve created three classes of resolutions. One is site suggestions and improvements to what we’re doing—this doesn’t require a resolution, just consultation with our product owner.  Two is an idea for discussion. One thing we observed with many resolutions were that they mainly solutions without identifying what they were trying to solve. Great idea, but we need to know why we’re doing it. Three is an actual resolution, the biggest one coming from the membership is video and that being approved.

JGF: Stocksy is one of the success stories of the Platform Co-op movement—you’ve been able to raise significant finance, and are now profitable. What do you think is needed within the sector for co-operatives to increase their market presence in the digital economy?

NS: A great product! One thing I took away from Open 2017 is that most organisations were co-ops first, and products or businesses second. I think we are fortunate for having a very strong product vision from the very beginning, and that the co-op structure worked for our business model. So someone looking to start a co-op needs to have a really good product or business plan first, then make sure that the co-operative model fits that secondarily. If you have no product, then it just becomes ideological and you lack a viable product.

Speaking to Nathan Schneider or Trebor Scholz, you learn that there are companies doing some amazing things, like Green Taxis in Denver, Colorado, who found a need and a business model that fit.

JGF: There are many well-known artist co-operatives, such as Magnum Photos and Pentagram, though they are not actively part of the movement. Is supporting new creative digital agencies to set up as co-operatives part of Stocky’s strategy for the future? And supporting the broader platform co-op movement?

BW: I don’t think our goal is to support competitors! We definitely get a lot of reach outs from other organisations about how to do profit sharing with people they are working with. Anything we can do to share knowledge, tell people about the stumbles and mistakes we’ve made, exploring the assumptions of being a platform co-op, since there are not many examples out there, it’s an incredibly important part of what we’re doing, supporting the platform community. At the end of the day, coming back to the previous question, I think it is about making it more easily understandable and accessible, I think there are many false assumptions that make people think co-ops are more complex and challenging than they actually are, when really it is only a way to approach business. It is not like it is some crazy, different way of doing business, it is just a commitment to investing in your people upfront, instead of having lots of resources to respond to an angry community that is misaligned with your product—which is what private business end up doing.

Brianna Wettlaufer is the co-founder and CEO and Nuno Silva is Vice President of Product at Stocksy United, an artist-owned, multistakeholder co-operative in Victoria, BC (Canada). With its stable of hand-picked photographers, Stocksy produces high-end and beautiful imagery.

Reposted from STIR Magazine

The post Brianna Wettlaufer & Nuno Silva on Stocksy United appeared first on P2P Foundation.

For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

The post Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Alice Casey and Peter Baeck: 2016 was the year the collaborative economy established itself as the big disruptor of everything, how we travel, shop and manage our money; 2017 was the year the tide began to turn and the sector came under increased scrutiny. 2018 will be the year of construction – collective action that will create new forms of collaborative economy models for a wider benefit.

In recent years we have seen rising opposition and campaigns against gig work. This was initially led by incumbents worried about disruption to their businesses and by gig economy workers themselves who felt they got a poor deal from the platform giants. Consumers, citizens, and politicians soon followed suit – and all increasingly began asking questions about workers’ rights, regulation, local impact and the sustainability of many of the business models in play, in particular how power and profit was shared between platform and workers powering the collaborative economy.

Creative construction

While most criticism of the platform giants has so far been focused on whether or not their business models treat workers fairly; in 2018 we predict that those workers who power large parts of the collaborative economy will take constructive, collective action. Inspired by the disruptive nature of the platforms they work through, they will create services and organisations that themselves disrupt and evolve the marketplace, rebalancing power and distributing revenue differently.

This will be driven by a number of factors including: access to ever cheaper and customisable organising technology; maturity and size of the collaborative economy; and an increase in peer networks of those trialling new forms of ownership and organising. It will be fuelled by the continued dominance of centralised collaborative platforms and their drawn-out legal battles, giving workers an incentive to rapidly create their own solutions.

We think that two parts of the collaborative economy will be reinvented in 2018 –  the organisation and the union.

The new organisations: platform cooperatives

Platform cooperatives connect dispersed resources and workers through the web, offering a collectively governed alternative to the centrally-owned platforms. This affects how revenue flows to workers, and beyond into communities. Workers share ownership, and take a role in governance and allocation of any surplus income generated. Instead of focusing on creating profit for shareholders, a cooperative model focuses on distributing income generated in line with members’ wishes. These innovative organisations are increasing in numbers and testing a range of operating models.

Platform coops offer the following features in contrast to dominant centralised platforms:

Surplus

Surplus funds generated above the operating cost of the organisation are voted on by members – and often shared among them. They may be reinvested in the organisation’s development or in some cases to support agreed causes. There is no one size fits all approach to allocating revenue surplus. Stocksy paid out $200,000 in dividends to its photographer members and offers high royalty rates, turning over $7.9 million. Open technology makes it easier to allocate and distribute income generated in various ways that were previously impractical; digital agency Outlandish uses cobudget to allocate openly; Fairbnb intends to donate surplus to improve the neighbourhoods where rental properties are located.

Collective governance

Membership models mean that workers can have a say in an organisation’s governance, and multi-stakeholder models such as Fairshares also give others, such as buyers or beneficiaries, a say too. Enabling meaningful members’ input at scale may be tackled in part through using collaborative technology such as Liquid Democracy and Loomio. This could help focus on quality and accountability.

Alternative growth

Federated coops offer a way for technology to be owned centrally, but governed by groups of coops or social value organisations. The marketplace Fairmondo creates units within countries, currently powered by Sharetribe technology. Networks such as Enspiral offer digitally-enabled ways to grow organisations, currently numbering 300 contributors. Decentralised organising offers another way to distribute governance and finance at scale, exploiting blockchain to verify transactions. Commune and Arcade City are experimenting with this in transportation. Resonate music offers a ‘stream to own’ model, which charges you a price per play until you’ve paid for the track.

Social impact

There is a need to support further experimentation in joining coops with platform technology to address social challenges differently. Increased worker involvement and platform tech offers some promise for social challenges such as adult social care. Inspiration is offered by Buurtzog, a non-profit foundation – though not a coop – it empowers care workers to manage their own workload, focus on quality and take decisions using tech to support this way of working, turning over €280 million. Pioneers include Care and Share Associates, a coop model of social care, and icare, a platform created to manage care data.

The new unions: worker networks

Just as digital platforms have allowed companies to coordinate large, dispersed groups of individual workers to perform coordinated gigs and tasks without them connecting to each other, workers are now using the same technology to connect, support each other and take collective action for themselves, rebalancing power in favour of the worker.

In 2018, this way of organising workers in the collaborative economy will move into the mainstream and operate alongside, in partnership with, and perhaps even in some cases replacing, traditional unions. The call in the Taylor Review for A WorkerTech Catalyst and the pioneering work done by tech for good accelerator Bethnal Green Ventures, in partnership with Resolution Trust, on incubating startups that support low-wage workers is likely to lend further momentum to this.

The growth in worker tech has been characterised by solutions focusing on:

Rights

The US-based Coworker platform is one of the most established examples of organised worker rights campaigning. The platform came to fame when Starbucks decided to end ‘Clopenings’ (where people work back-to-back shifts) after more than 10,000 Starbucks employees signed a petition against this. Ten per cent of Starbucks staff have joined Coworker.

Accountability

More recently an Etsy employee launched a Coworker campaign to mobilise employees (and sellers and customers) to ‘ensure the company doesn’t stray from its values’, and Uber drivers used the platform to lobby for changes to the app, such as a tipping function, which was subsequently followed up by the company.

Ratings

In Germany, faircrowd.work has been set up to allow workers in the collaborative economy to share and access information and reviews of platforms including ratings of working conditions, including a guide to the different established and new unions that can help workers.

Dispute resolution

In a further evolution, eight European crowdsourcing platforms, the German Crowdsourcing Association, and the German Metalworkers’ Union established a joint Ombuds Office in 2017, tasked with resolving disputes between crowdworkers, clients, and crowdsourcing platforms.

Peer support

Closer to home, Welsh cooperative Indycube provides a voice for freelancers, carrying out invoice chasing and legal freelancer support services as well as operating a coworking space. Cotech offers support to its 29 technology cooperative members, running a network turning over £9 million and a workspace in London.

Insurance

As the setup of the work has changed so has the need for insurance. Some commercial operators like Zego provide ‘pay as you go insurance’ for riders in the gig economy. Others are experimenting with setting up insurance and mutual support between peers of workers. One example of this is Breadfunds. Now being trialled in the UK, but originally a concept developed in the Netherlands, bread funds are groups of 25 to 50 people who contribute money each month into a fund to support any of its members who become unable to work through illness or injury.

Disrupting the disruptors: Why now?

These developments represent growing demand for disruption and redistribution of power and profit in the collaborative economy.

The initial rapid growth of the giants in the collaborative platform economy was powered by billions in venture investment and enabled by regulatory environments that helped the disruptors to grow. Imagine what the models above would be like if they had received even a fraction of the billions in investment that have supported companies like Uber, Task Rabbit or AirBnB.

However, supporting this new wave of innovation is not just about investment in individual companies, it is about creating conditions for wider, distributed participation in the collaborative economy. We also need to ensure that regulatory frameworks anticipate such models, and that open licensing and a free and open web is maintained to allow the new wave of disruptors to grow and thrive, unfettered by incumbent interests.

In 2018, this new wave of disruptors is set to leapfrog the first wave of collaborative economy innovations to produce new socially and financially sustainable alternatives.

The rapid increase in demand for worker-led platform services, and the digital, open and decentralised nature of worker tech and platform coops means that they have an easy and flexible route to create new ways of working.

Photo by Tsahi Levent-Levi

The post Disrupting the disruptors: The collaborative economy changes direction appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the banner of ‘platform cooperativism’, an emerging network of cooperative developers, entrepreneurs, labor organizers and scholars is developing an economic ecosystem that seeks to align the ownership and governance of enterprises with the people whose lives are most affected by them. This represents a radical critique of the existing online economy, but it’s also a field of experimentation for alternative forms of ownership design. This essay presents and analyzes some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that could serve the platform economy of the future differently than the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

Acknowledgments
This essay stems from an ongoing collaboration with Trebor Scholz, and while he is innocent of my oversights, I am indebted to his insights. The following has also benefited from the input and feedback of Devin Balkind, Josef Davies-Coates, Enric Duran, Daniel Hu, Brent Hueth, Tim Kuhn and Keith Taylor, in part through an open review process at https://ioo.coop.

On March 18, 2016, at a press conference with US Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez on his right and a platform user named Ty Lane on his left, Managed by Q CEO Dan Teran announced, ‘Over the next five years, Managed by Q will give 5 percent of the company to the operators working in the field’.¹ On the backdrop behind them, Managed by Q’s logo – a futuristic, sans-serif grey Q repeated over a black background, much like Uber’s U – evoked the company’s status as one of the many trying to be ‘the Uber for x’ – in this case, the Uber for office-cleaning. But Teran’s announcement represented a departure from Uber’s notorious disavowal of employment responsibility for its drivers, whom it seems impatient to supplant with self-driving cars. In addition to full-time jobs and benefits, Managed by Q was welcoming the platform’s worker-users as genuine co-owners.

Co-ownership has mostly been missing in the implicit social contracts of online platforms – the Internet-enabled, multi-sided markets that employ networked forms of connection and transaction to transform industries, workplaces and livelihoods (Parker et al., 2016). The principal owners of platforms, along with founders, have been the investors who inject capital in expectation of generous returns. Technology companies may offer stock options to early employees; users, in contrast, have been treated like external customers. Yet in many cases they don’t pay the company any money while contributing essential content (e.g., virtually everything one encounters on platforms like Facebook or Reddit), even entrusting to the platform their personal data and their livelihoods. Platforms train users to think of themselves as participants in ‘peer production’ (Benkler, 2007) and a ‘sharing economy’ (Schor, 2014). But the online economy’s ownership structures habitually fail to reflect either the platforms’ stated aspirations or their social realities.

Managed by Q’s directors, however, recognized that its office-cleaning ‘operators’ were a class of users that served as the company’s face to the office-owning clients who provided revenue; co-ownership, therefore, seemed like an appropriate way to incentivize operators to take their responsibility seriously. The announcement also made for good press.

Canonical notions of corporate structure and governance, even when they encompass a wide variety of stakeholders, tend to affirm the practice of granting ownership and control to investors, since they bear direct financial risk (Jensen, 2000; Monks and Minow, 2008; Parmar et al., 2010). But when platforms hold near-monopoly status and wield control over urban transportation networks or data about intimate relationships, their risk profile is more complex than a share price. Platforms increasingly act as infrastructure, enabling productive activity among users – from individuals to large organizations. They’re not just a means of production but a means of connection. These webs of dependency, however, have not reached the platforms’ boardrooms. Managed by Q’s experience, together with a growing body of research on cooperative models, suggests that platform builders may be missing out on opportunities shared ownership could present – from retention, loyalty and diversity among their users to untapped potential for financing and public benefit (Albæk and Schultz, 1998; Davidson, 2016; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Pérotin, 2016).

The platforms now vying for dominance have tended not to maintain high labor standards among user-workers and other contractors, even bending the law in the process (Scholz, 2016b, Slee, 2016). Platform-based workers typically lack the expectation of coverage for illness, injury and retirement. The allure is real, as platforms offer the possibility of independent livelihoods, a departure from the drudgery and discipline of an old-fashioned job. But platform owners enjoy the far more lucrative benefits of having a fluid workforce without a large, fixed payroll. Investor-owners have little to lose and much to gain from sidestepping the conventional responsibilities of employment.

Less visibly, the mismatch between the interests of platform owners and users presents itself in the realm of data. Ubiquitous platforms like Facebook and Google, as well as others that operate more discreetly, gather reams of data about Internet users and offer it as a product. This data supplies a growing surveillance economy based on targeted advertising and pricing, which, intentionally or not, easily bleeds into discrimination of already marginalized populations (Bernasek and Mongan, 2015; Couldry, 2016; Pasquale, 2015). Although a platform like Facebook may insist that users retain ownership of their data, immense and illegible service agreements grant the platform such sweeping rights over that data as to render user ownership close to meaningless. Additionally, the prospect that one’s online activity might affect a credit rating, or find its way into the database of a spy agency, has already dampened the free speech that the Internet once promised.

As the platform economy reorients how industries operate, it should also challenge taken-for-granted corporate ownership models. Cooperative ownership not only shares wealth more equitably among participants, but it also unlocks efficiencies by reducing the costs of transacting and contracting with an enterprise’s essential stakeholders (Bogetoft, 2005; Hansmann, 2000; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Taylor, 2015). Online platforms have yet to enjoy the value and benefits of this model. The time seems especially ripe to take up the challenge that Marjorie Kelly (2012) has described as ‘ownership design’: What ownership structures are appropriate, competitive and just for an economy orchestrated through platforms? How can corporate structure better align the feedback loops of actual online sociality?

One collective effort to address these questions, and one in which I have been involved, has come to be called ‘platform cooperativism’. As well as a rhetorical insurgency, this initative has opened a space of experimentation in online ownership design, taking inspiration from the legacy and ownership designs of the mostly offline cooperative movement. I will present and analyze here some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that may serve the platform economy of the future differently than have the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

‘The next sharing economy’

Cooperative economies of some kind have probably existed as long as human economies in general. But in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism, they have formed a distinct and transnational sector, with shared values and business practices of its own. From local food and housing co-ops to vast co-ops of farmers, retail stores, or electric utilities, this sector generates over $2.2 trillion in turnover worldwide, often in ways that serve needs unmet by investor-owned businesses.² It’s a part of the global economy widely relied upon yet overlooked, a ‘sharing economy’ before Silicon Valley adopted the term.

The prospect of platform cooperativism is at once new and old among the cultures surrounding the Internet. Early software and hardware hackers employed certain cooperative-like practices as they assembled the rudiments of the personal computer and the means of networking them. They shared source code; they developed structures of democratic governance across great distances; they resisted corporate enclosure in the process (Benkler, 2007; Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). Small groups of software developers have formed successful worker-cooperatives.³ Some of tech culture’s innovations deserve to be studied more closely by the offline cooperative movement, as they demonstrate the plausibility of, and some proven techniques for, highly distributed and productive self-management; many co-ops emerging among young people today are organized around tech culture’s flexible, networked forms of connection rather than recreating industrial-era jobs and membership societies. Platform cooperativism, therefore, is not starting from scratch in tech culture.

Still, true cooperative business models have been almost entirely absent from the online economy. One can at least speculate about the reasons why. The disruptive efficacy of the venture-capital financing mechanism has rendered it a go-to blueprint to the exclusion of other approaches. The technological sophistication necessary to build online enterprises has also proved prohibitive for the often-marginalized communities that tend to adopt cooperative strategies. And until recently the Internet could be considered an optional realm of activity; co-ops tend to appear when people have an unmet need, not to furnish a mere accessory or curiosity. But it is becoming harder and harder, around the world, to secure a livelihood without taking part in the online economy. Perhaps this is why, in the past few years, recognizable platform co-ops have begun to appear.

The Spanish collective Las Indias distinguished platforms as one type of cooperative in a 2011 blog post (de Ugarte). In 2012 the Italian federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto for ‘Cooperative Commons’, stressing the need for cooperative business models to manage the growing stores of data that users feed to online platforms.⁴ Stocksy United, a stock-photo platform owned by its photographers, went online the following year. By 2014, Janelle Orsi, founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, was calling for ‘the next sharing economy’⁵ – the sharing of cooperative ownership – and was helping to design the bylaws for Loconomics, a gig platform owned by its workers. I began documenting such projects in collaboration with the online newsletter Shareable (Schneider, 2014); meanwhile, drawing on the lessons of his Digital Labor conferences at The New School, Trebor Scholz coined the term ‘platform cooperativism’ as an alternative to the systemic abuses of investor-owned platforms (Scholz, 2014 and 2016a). In consultation with labor organizations and platform workers, Scholz and I co-organized the 2015 Digital Labor conference, ‘Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy’, and co-edited a subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own (2017). People around the world trying to develop online platforms through democratic ownership and governance began to coalesce their scattered efforts into a new economic ecosystem.

Since early 2015, along with Devin Balkind of Sarapis and others, I have maintained The Internet of Ownership⁶, the most exhaustive directory to date of the platform co-op ecosystem, and I lean heavily on that experience here. The directory includes not only ‘co-op platforms’ (which adhere to the International Co-operative Alliance’s standards for cooperative identity, detailed below) and various tools and organizations that support them, but also ‘sharing platforms’ (like Managed by Q) that practice shared ownership or governance with platform users, at least in part.

Platform cooperativism can likewise be taken to mean a broad invitation to a fairer online economy through shared ownership and governance; platform co-ops, however, are strictly those platforms that are also bona-fide co-ops by widely agreed-on standards (Sutton et al., 2016). The most recent revision of the principles that the International Co-operative Alliance holds,⁷ adopted in 1995, is as follows:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership
2. Democratic Member Control
3. Member Economic Participation
4. Autonomy and Independence
5. Education, Training and Information
6. Co-operation among Co-operatives
7. Concern for Community

To clarify these, the ICA promulgates the accompanying ‘values’ of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

Most of the cooperative principles resonate somewhat with the social contracts of the platform economy. ‘Voluntary and open membership’ is a default practice among platforms, which typically enable anyone (with access to requisite technology) to create an account; ‘autonomy and independence’, too, is a value that platform owners often assert while disrupting incumbent industries, even while proclaiming a well-meaning ‘concern for community’. There is much ‘co-operation’ among platform companies as well, such as through API protocols and standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium. Practices of ‘education, training and information’ often happen on platforms through much the kind of mutual education – in online forums and in-person meetups – that cooperatives encourage among their members.

The resonance, however, only goes so far. Principles two and three above – democratic governance and ownership, crucially – are almost wholly absent from the platform economy. Online user-experience design often seeks to divert users’ attention from matters of governance and ownership, such as by rendering opaque the processes of revenue generation through apparently ‘free’ services. Consultation with users on changes to features or policies is, at best, superficial.

Democracy itself has taken on a new meaning online. A Web search for ‘democratize internet’ or the like reveals that in tech culture ‘democracy’ has come to signify merely an expansion of access to various tools and resources, rather than the collective governance and joint stakeholdership to which the word, in other contexts, refers. That old kind of democracy is illegible to the Internet’s dominant ownership designs. The contention of platform cooperativism is that the design of platform businesses, and thus of the online economy generally, can and should allow for democracy in the fullest sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and cooperation won’t necessarily produce the appropriate response to every design challenge. But these kinds of designs are worth at least considering far more than they have been in the online economy thus far.

I hope I can be forgiven for leaving the necessary, important task of raising objections about the value and prospects of platform cooperativism to others. I look forward to learning from them. But it has seemed to me a better use of this space to offer a broad sketch of the movement’s progress. I hope, also, that the critiques of this nascent movement might come in the form of challenges rather than repudiations that could cut it at the root. It should be a foregone conclusion, but is too often not, that in a society that claims to be democratic, the advancement of democracy into new spheres of social life should be a question of how, not whether.

Ownership designs

In the following I introduce some of the design patterns (Alexander et al., 1977) that have so far arisen in the experimentation of platform cooperativism and related undertakings. Most of the projects referred to can be found in The Internet of Ownership directory, as well as the ‘showcases’ in Ours to Hack and to Own. I draw from published material on their websites and my conversations with their participants. While nearly all are too early-stage for a thoroughgoing evaluation, the patterns they embody at least trace the outlines of a new palette of options for ownership design in the online economy.

Work: Value creators as value owners

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which enables posting and carrying out piece-work tasks (tag some images, transcribe a recording, fill out a survey), gets its name from an eighteenth-century curiosity in which a human chess player sat discreetly inside a machine, dazzling the public and contemporary notables alike with its apparently mechanical intelligence. The reference is too apt for comfort; the human beings working on Mechanical Turk appear through the platform almost as if they were just another algorithm. Starting in 2014, these workers mounted a widely publicized email-writing campaign called ‘Dear Jeff Bezos’, alerting the Amazon CEO to the fact that ‘Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment and open communication’.⁸

Workers on Mechanical Turk, for instance, enjoy no minimum wage or ability to rate the behavior of the pseudonymous employers who meanwhile rate theirs. And while this case is egregious, it is not unique. In 2016, as many as 24 percent of US adults reported earning income on platforms (Smith, 2016). The prevailing platform business model is to achieve scale while reducing labor costs and interference in management, automating tasks wherever possible.

Platform cooperativism inclines toward another approach, one in which the people contributing value co-own the platforms and help decide to what ends they operate. The aforementioned Loconomics, for instance, is a platform co-op for short-term gigs in which the workers are co-owners; unlike ‘Turkers’, who rarely receive replies from Amazon when they submit complaints, Loconomics is designed to benefit from worker participation in governance. Its worker-owners invest in the platform through periodic dues. Also in the San Francisco area, the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West union is backing the Nursing and Caregivers Cooperative, through which the nurses collectivize and co-mange the terms under which they deploy their labor on their app, NursesCan. The stock-photo platform Stocksy United, incorporated as a Canadian cooperative, has found that including the photographers as members (alongside staff and founders) is a way of recruiting more talented contributors than might otherwise be possible, and of prioritizing artistic quality over ruthless expansion.

Part of securing fair work-lives on platforms is the development of ‘portable benefits’ that don’t rely on any one employer, but that better suit the promiscuous connectivity of a platform economy. This, too, is a job well suited to co-op models – hearkening back to the cooperative mutuals that gave birth to the modern insurance industry. The Freelancers Union in the United States and SMart in Europe are membership organizations that have delivered benefits to many thousands of independent workers, relying heavily on online tools. This kind of model, often in cooperative forms, is proliferating rapidly (Conaty et al., 2016).

The storied successes of twentieth-century worker cooperativism – such as the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy – sought to secure full-time industrial jobs. But many in the latest generation of co-ops seem designed to free their members from the need for a job altogether. Prime Produce, for instance, is a cooperative co-working space in New York City that prefers the language and ethic of ‘craft’ over ‘work’; the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral aspires to redefine work as ‘stuff that matters’. ‘Open companies’ (such as Gratipay, a crowdfunding platform) or ‘open value networks’ (such as Sensorica, which develops scientific instruments) have sought to rely on no employees at all, but to create products by rewarding the contributions of participants through a distributed platform. In Barcelona and the surrounding region, the Catalan Integral Cooperative draws member-owners in first by facilitating freelance work, and then by enabling them to obtain food, housing and services through internal trade and mutual credit rather than relying on euros. Some of its members have been involved in creating FairCoop, which proposes to do much the same on a global scale by connecting local ‘nodes’ through online tools, including a cryptocurrency called FairCoin (Schneider, 2015b).

Platforms need not regard those who contribute value through them as temporary stand-ins for algorithms. By orienting their business models around such contributors, platforms can provide not only decent livelihoods, but also a means of bypassing dependency on employment relations altogether.

Data: Treat it like it’s someone’s stuff

Much as Mechanical Turk disguises value-contributing workers behind a platform, business models based on so-called ‘big data’ often seek to disguise the fact that they’re capturing value from those contributing it. Facebook, for instance, provides extensive privacy controls by which users can customize what other users see about them – few of which affect, however, what Facebook itself sees, records and claims license to monetize. The economic power and promise of large pools of human data depend on the relinquishment of certain ownership rights by the humans involved, such as through opaque service agreements. These pools, in turn, can become outsourced repositories for government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

What would less duplicitous ownership designs for data look like? Commodify.us, for instance, has pioneered a model by which users can download a copy of their data from Facebook, then re-upload it, selecting which license they would like to apply to each data set – allowing them to monetize their data on their own terms. A more developed version of that general idea is TheGoodData, a London-based co-op, which allows users to monetize their browsing data with a browser extension and donate the proceeds to charitable causes. Meanwhile, under the aegis of MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, an ambitious initiative called Solid (‘SOcial Linked Data’) proposes a framework for a new species of social applications based on modular, consensual data-sharing agreements, granting users granular control over what they share.

Given the centrality of trust and ownership in matters of data, particularly highly personal data, cooperative business models may be especially well suited to building data economies that are both transparent and competitive. Starting with highly sensitive medical data, the Swiss platform MIDATA.coop is developing a business model for personal data storage based on cooperative ownership and governance, together with secure open-source software. In the United Kingdom, a research project called OurData.coop is exploring the potential for a widespread system of such data co-ops, through which people could both retain control over and selectively monetize data that they produce.

A further use-case for data co-ops is in practicing the sixth cooperative principle of cooperation among cooperatives. Already, established co-ops like Ringlink Scotland (which supports agricultural business development) facilitate data-sharing among their members. Newer projects, such as the U.S.-based Data Commons Cooperative and CoopData.org, seek to provide platforms for data-sharing among co-ops that can help them find each other and work together. The promise of big data need not depend on ambiguous or misleading ownership arrangements.

Code: Keep the lords’ hands out of the commons

At least since the Charter of the Forest that accompanied the Magna Carta, people who live by and co-manage common resources have found the need to protect them from the acquisitive tendencies of those at the top of the social pyramid (Linebaugh, 2009). In order to protect the code-sharing habits of early hacker culture from the proprietary urges of corporations and universities, Richard Stallman inaugurated the Free Software movement with the GNU Public License in 1989. This and similar ‘copyleft’ licenses were quintessential hacks, turning intellectual-property law against itself by employing an author’s copyright privileges in order to liberate her code into a commons, free for anyone – with the requisite skills, equipment and time – to use, adapt and improve. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig pioneered the transfer of this same hack to non-software cultural production through the array of Creative Commons licenses (Bollier, 2008). The accomplishments of this movement have been remarkable; copyleft practices have insinuated themselves into the modus operandi of the mainstream tech industry, creating many billions of dollars worth of freely available, world-class software in the process.

The tradition of hacking intellectual-property law, however, has not extended to the challenge of hacking corporate structure and corporate profits; as a result, there has been a disconnect between production, governance and ownership. The terminology of ‘open source’, which emerged about a decade after Stallman’s GPL, advertised collaborative code-sharing as an opportunity for low-cost, crowdsourced corporate innovation. Many of the large open-source projects now operate through foundations guided and funded by corporations that benefit from the community-developed code. Google, for instance, has been able to redeploy the open-source Linux kernel as Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, which also happens to be an effective tool for transmitting lucrative user data to the company’s proprietary databases.

The leading online peer-production communities, like Wikipedia and Linux, have also remained troublingly homogeneous, with low rates of participation among women and (at least in the United States) non-white ethnicities. Explanations for this in such communities range from instructive to denialist. But the reality is that those engaged in peer production must either be paid to do so or have surplus leisure time – a surplus that less-privileged populations are less likely to have (Dryden, 2013). By relinquishing ownership of intellectual property to this kind of commons, peer producers may have actually amplified some of the inequalities of the society around them, while allowing corporations to reap the profits. Corporate-led open-source development, too, has cultivated highly sophisticated back-end tools while leaving the features that are user-facing – that is, customer-facing – far less well developed, rendering them unable to compete with commercial counterparts.

Many of platform cooperativism’s early advocates have been advocates, too, of Free Software and the open-source movement. Stallman, as well as Free Software partisan Micky Metts, spoke at the 2015 New School conference. Some insist that platform cooperativism should include a commitment to the exclusive use and production of the GPL and similar licenses. Others in the community have embraced a new generation of intellectual-property hacks specifically attuned to corporate ownership design as well as the intellectual property itself.

Dmytri Kleiner’s Telekommunist Manifesto (2010) outlined a proposal for a ‘Peer Production License’, which adapted the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license by adding a clause that permits commercial use by worker-owned enterprises that distribute surpluses solely to the worker-owners. If Linux were licensed in this way, Google couldn’t make use of it but a worker-owned company developing mobile devices could. Lost is the mainstreaming effect of corporate adoption, but the value conjured by peer-producers is not so easily captured by capital. Co-ops gain a competitive advantage. The Peer Production License has been promoted by P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens (in Scholz and Schneider, 2016), and the platform co-op Guerrilla Translation has adopted it as a general policy – though it remains marginal and largely untested in practice.

A more restrictive experiment in license innovation is the ‘Co-op Source License’ of the Co-op Source Foundation, a software-development platform co-op.⁹ This license assigns profits from commercialized software to contributors based on “commitment level and peer review.” CoMakery, while not itself a cooperative, is a startup developing a tool for distributing profits in this kind of arrangement with the aid of blockchain technology.

Even without adopting additional restrictions, platform co-ops have sought to develop new strategies for connecting the immense value in the open-software commons with end-users. Snowdrift.coop, for instance, is a cooperative platform designed to provide sustainable financial support for projects that contribute to such commons; platforms like this could incentivize open-source developers to focus more attention on user interfaces that can compete with closed-source alternatives.

Platform cooperativists seek to add a more fair and explicit economic layer to peer-production, prevent corporate value capture and facilitate cooperation among cooperatives. Some of the more restrictive proposals could come at the cost of losing the broad user and contributor base that corporate adoption can offer. Yet each of these experiments represents a plausible innovation in its own right as well as a constructive critique of the Free Software and open-source legacies.

Protocols: No decentralization without representation

Defenders of a free and open Internet also cherish the network’s decentralized design. While working at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s, Paul Baran developed the concept of distributed packet-switching as the basis of a communication system that wouldn’t rely on any single node that could be vulnerable to Soviet attack (Baran, 2002). Despite notable exceptions such as the Domain Name System, this distributed logic pervades the Internet’s protocols. The liberating promise of decentralized networks, in turn, seems to have inclined Internet denizens to seek further liberation through further decentralization. Technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing have allowed users – by relying on no central server – to share copyrighted music and video files without interference from the copyright holders. Platform cooperativism is in a sense a call for decentralization as well, in particular the decentralization of ownership.

The Internet as many people experience it has become remarkably centralized. They gain access through the monopolistic broadband providers that have replaced the small-scale, local ISPs that were common in the days of dial-up (although some regions co-own their broadband through cooperative utilities). Much of their online lives takes place through a small number of monolithic companies such as Facebook and Google – which track browsing habits through cookies, embedded buttons and mobile surveillance. But decentralization is also undergoing a revival, as early Internet architects like Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle call for re-decentralizing the Web.¹⁰ These initiatives seek to challenge the centralized platforms with a new generation of decentralized protocols. The cryptographic blockchain technology that enabled the Bitcoin digital currency system, meanwhile, makes possible a bewildering array of decentralized possibilities, from a replacement for the Domain Name System (e.g., Namecoin) to ‘distributed autonomous organizations’ made of ‘smart contracts’ (e.g., Ethereum). Advocates revel in the ambition of a ‘trustless’ ‘decentralized society’ that cryptography will allegedly enable (Frank, 2015). And in many respects the promise is real.

Bitcoin, however, has become a cautionary tale. While the underlying cryptography has held up according to spec, the social outcomes are less encouraging. Wealth distribution in the Bitcoin economy is massively stratified – much more so than in the conventional economy – and a small cabal of ‘mining’ pools have come to dominate the creation of new coins and the governance of the system. In effect, Bitcoin has become centralized yet ungovernable.

The urge to decentralize and distribute authority across networks risks neglecting the necessary work of reconstituting that authority in democratic ways. But decentralization and democracy can go hand in hand, too. For some years now, federated social networks like Diaspora, Friendica and GNU Social have implemented features familiar to users of Facebook and Twitter through decentralized networks of independently owned and governed nodes. I am a member of the ‘democratic membership organization’ May First/People Link, which finances, owns and manages a GNU Social node; my data for the network is managed, therefore, by an organization accountable to me, while enabling me to interact freely with the global network. This model, while less lucrative for investors than a centralized social network, is well suited to democratic organizations. Scale occurs through the protocol, not the platform.

The democratic potential of blockchain technologies, also, is considerable – even if it has rarely prevailed in practice. While Ethereum smart contracts could implement a digital autocracy governed by an absolute monarch or an unaccountable robot, they’re just as capable of facilitating highly democratic structures. Some projects have turned to cooperative models to solve problems that vex other blockchain systems; Rchain uses a co-op as a means of scalability, while Moeda turns to credit unions as partners for expanding financial inclusion.

To those who regard decentralization as a liberatory end in itself, platform cooperativism adds the qualification that having a decentralized system doesn’t remove the challenge of governance – it just alters where and how governance takes place. For decentralization to have democratic consequences, it needs democratic design.

Finance: Rent capital, don’t be rented by it

Some assume that cooperatives are incompatible with large-scale financing, that they must forego the growth and innovation that investor ownership enables. A glance at the global cooperative sector, however, belies this. It is true that cooperatives cannot cede the powers of governance and ownership that investors typically expect, but in areas where co-ops have flourished, they have formed quite formidable financial institutions – such as credit unions and cooperative banks – to hold capital and make it available to the sector for growth. José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragon Corporation, insisted that co-ops have a responsibility to capitalize: ‘A cooperativism without the structural ability to attract and assimilate capital at the level of the demands of industrial productivity is a transitory solution, an obsolete formula’ (2013).

Rather than ruling out the possibility of financing, cooperative models require a different kind of ownership design in their financing schemes than businesses that invite investor control. Thus far, however, the online economy has relied on a venture-capital investment model based on granting considerable rights to early investors, followed by an eventual ‘exit’ through either selling the company to another company or trading shares on speculative markets. For platform cooperativism to take hold as a live option for enterprises, other designs are needed.

Loomio is a New Zealand-based worker co-op that produces a popular online decision-making platform. Venture capital was not an option, and the team members considered adopting non-profit status, but found it incompatible with their ambitions for scale. By early 2016, however, they had raised a round of $450,000 from investors who supported their mission and regarded their worker-owned structure as adequate assurance. The investors purchased non-voting, redeemable-preference shares, assuring a return based on the company’s revenue without compromising its cooperative model. While the investment remains a modest one by Silicon Valley standards, it beckons toward more sizable promise.

Cooperatives were, in a sense, the original crowdfunding, allowing communities to self-fund enterprises that served them. And while online crowdfunding has been an effective enabler of new initiatives, it lacks the shared ownership of co-ops. New platforms want to bring that back. Seedbloom is building an blockchain-based equity crowdfunding tool, enabling contributors to become co-owners of the projects they support; it has already helped enable the development of Resonate, a cooperative music-streaming platform owned by fans, musicians, and labels. Open Collective, while not a cooperative, is a crowdfunding tool that enables groups to form online cooperatives and manage their budgets without need for formal incorporation or a bank account. Tools like these can help significantly lower the barriers to co-op formation.

A vibrant platform co-op sector will require a variety of financing mechanisms. Purpose Ventures is an emerging investment firm designed from the start to specialize in ‘self-owned’, ‘purpose driven’ companies that seek sustainable growth, not a rapid exit; as the companies grow, their success enables new companies to join a mutually supporting ecosystem. FairCoop is attempting to create a global cooperative financial system with several concurrent mechanisms, including its own cryptocurrency, a mutual-credit network, a savings service and a variety of mission-driven funds.

A further source for platform co-op investment is the existing offline cooperative sector. While some large, well-capitalized co-ops have begun investing in platforms, they often face a learning curve in doing so. Just as the tech sector has yet to learn what it takes to systematically develop co-ops, the cooperative sector must learn how to apply its financial resources and know-how online. One promising approach may be to forge collaborations between successful tech accelerators and cooperative financial institutions.

What unites these various forms of cooperative-friendly financing is how they reverse the conventional corporate model, in which capital rents workers’ time and seeks to extract profit from customers. In co-ops, online and off, participants find capital when they need it and rent it without relinquishing their business in exchange.

Education: Train owners, not just workers

The promotion of education has been a pillar of cooperative enterprise at least since the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers’ famous store in mid-nineteenth-century England, and it remains a basic principle for the global cooperative movement. Business shapes the people who engage in it as an implicit education; cooperativism seeks to make that education explicit, and to educate members as informed, empowered stewards and owners. Some of the world’s most important co-op networks, including the Mondragon Corporation and the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, grew out of schools. It is an irony of Silicon Valley’s history that Leland Stanford, founder of the tech industry’s flagship university, was a passionate advocate of cooperative enterprise and included in his Grant of Endowment a directive ‘to have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation’; it’s an intention that the university, and the tech industry it helped spawn, has largely ignored (Altenberg, 1990).

In Scholz and Schneider (2016), a chapter by Karen Gregory asks in its title, ‘Can Tech Schools Go Cooperative?’ By ‘tech schools’, she refers to the recent proliferation of unaccredited, often for-profit ‘bootcamps’ that offer intensive curricula designed to produce students ready for well-paying jobs for software companies in a matter of only weeks or months. Gregory proposes, instead, a kind of tech school that sets the bar higher, to ownership: ‘a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing and worker agency’. Gregory calls for locating such schools in public universities, for the sake of accessibility for populations currently underrepresented in tech jobs. New programs in cooperative business at public institutions – such as the City University of New York and Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California – are currently in development, but by and large their orientation is toward offline cooperatives.

A model partly along the lines Gregory describes, meanwhile, has emerged through the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral, which is home, among other enterprises, to Loomio. In 2014 members of the network formed Enspiral Dev Academy, a coding school that equips students with marketable skills while also introducing them to the opportunities for co-ownership in Enspiral itself. The academy offers scholarships and priority for applicants from underrepresented populations (as some more conventional tech schools do as well). Likewise outside the sphere of public education, the educational arms of cooperatives like Mondragon Corporation and Co-operatives UK offer distance-learning programs that could prefigure platform co-op models for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the like.

Whether in public or private forms, education will be an essential component of a platform co-op sector. Some of the most important education likely takes place through the platforms themselves, in the ways by which a platform presents itself to members as a medium of co-ownership and elicits from them responsible decision-making and stewardship.

Governance: Kumbaya won’t do

In co-ops and investor-owned companies alike, shared governance can turn into a caricature. Those with limited experience in the cooperative sector might assume that just because an enterprise is, say, legally owned by its workers, cumbersome consensus-based processes must be the norm. And in companies where the workers are not owners, managers might try similarly cumbersome performances to instill a fictional ‘sense of ownership’ intended to encourage more productive behaviors. Platform cooperativism has challenged both versions of superficial communalism by seeking to align appropriate ownership and governance structures rather than hiding one behind the other.

The task of efficiently balancing the stakeholdership relationships of the platform economy is far from straightforward. Traditional lines that distinguish worker-owned, consumer-owned, or producer-owned co-ops tend to blur in a platform economy where much of a platform’s value comes from the contributions and resources of people who are not the company’s employees. Many emerging platform co-ops have opted for multi-stakeholder models that encompass various classes of co-owners, such as employees, users and customers. The FairShares model, for instance, is a recent effort to facilitate and codify a multi-stakeholder structure. Platform co-ops like Loconomics, Resonate and Stocksy United use multi-stakeholder structures for both ownership and governance.

There are lessons to be drawn from the distributed governance models of foregoing tech culture. Open-source software communities have developed sophisticated governance practices, ranging from the formality of the Debian Constitution, which manages a popular version of Linux, to the free-for-all of an IRC channel. These hackers’ commitment to transparency, also, can offer correctives to a cooperative movement that has too often been opaque, even to its members. Holacracy and sociocracy are governance structures that conventional companies have used to distribute authority and empower employees; they’re even better suited to cooperative models in which that empowerment extends to ownership of the company itself.

Experiments that have emerged from civic and political innovation have proved useful for economic democracy, too. Loomio – which translated the decision making processes of Wellington, New Zealand’s 2011 Occupy encampment into a platform – serves as a primary governance tool for Enspiral and other co-ops worldwide, along with schools, government programs and businesses. The ‘liquid democracy’ model pioneered among alternative political parties in Europe and South America could be well-suited for large-scale platform co-ops.

There is potential for governance, also, in the now-reflexive daily practices of online platforms – Facebook ‘likes’, Reddit ‘upvotes’ and so forth. These features of user experience could become the rudiments of meaningful shared governance. If this were the case, we might see a reduction in the often careless behavior found on social media. Could the Reddit uprising of 2015, which ousted a CEO, have proceeded more constructively if Reddit users had levers for self-governance besides conspiring to shut down the platform?

Not every wheel of governance must be reinvented. For all the radical governance models on offer, platform co-ops need not necessarily reject every practice that conventional platform companies already employ – while retaining the significant difference that the managers are ultimately accountable not to outside investors but to the platforms’ actual participants, as well as to the communities in which participants live.

Policy: Local value for local benefit and control

Confronting the platform economy’s onrush of disruptions, policymakers have found themselves in the position of trying to say ‘no’, in various and sometimes futile ways, as they attempt to retain appropriate control over their economic infrastructures. Ride-sharing platforms destabilize structures for taxi regulation, and room-renting platforms unsettle tourism policies. Both bypass established compromises in labor relations. Industries that were once more or less locally governed and owned are now orchestrated from the platforms’ headquarters far away – and those platforms’ investors insist on taking a sizable cut. Platform cooperativism gestures toward a new set of options to consider, toward something policymakers can say ‘yes’ to.

Co-ops have long represented this kind of constructive alternative, and in many parts of the world their flourishing has been made possible through proactive policy. In the United States, for instance, the Department of Agriculture provided grants and loans for the creation of electric utility co-ops in rural areas that investor-owned companies opted not to electrify, starting in the 1930s; today, federal agencies have begun helping some of those same co-ops offer user-owned broadband service. Co-ops are a tool not only for meeting needs that capital markets fail to meet, but for doing so justly, in a way that keeps wealth among the constituencies that create it. To this effect, Michel Bauwens and others have theorized the ‘partner state’ as a framework for governments that enable, but do not control or direct, the flourishing of cooperative and commons-oriented enterprise (Kostakis and Bauwens, 2014). The city of Barcelona has taken early steps to enshrine platform cooperativism into its economic strategies. And in August 2016, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto’ that included ‘platform cooperatives’ among its eight planks.

In her statement for the 2015 Platform Cooperativism conference,¹¹ New York City Council member Maria del Carmen Arroyo wrote, ‘Worker cooperatives offer a viable method to address the long-term challenge of reducing the number of chronically unemployed and underemployed residents and the number of workers trapped in low-paying jobs’. To this end, she had already supported legislation to fund worker-cooperative development in the city, as well as steps toward preferential treatment for co-ops in city infrastructure contracting. She added that platform cooperativism ‘can put the public in greater control of the Internet, which can often feel like an abyss we are powerless over’. Another City Council member, Ben Kallos, made a last-minute appearance at the conference to announce his proposal for a ‘Universal E-Hail App’ with an open protocol that would level the competition between taxis and ride-sharing drivers.

Taking the example of the accommodations-rental platform Airbnb, Janelle Orsi has proposed three kinds of cooperative alternatives, outlining a distinct role for government in the ownership design of each (Schneider, 2015a). What she calls ‘Co-bnb’ would be a co-op owned by the renters of rooms in a given area; ‘Munibnb’ would be owned and operated by cities as a public good, enabling them to set controls and caps on short-term rentals; similarly city-managed, ‘Allbnb’ would add the principle of redirecting the profits from the platform back to residents as dividends, recognizing the fact that, when visitors come, their hosts are all the city’s residents, not just those from whom they rent a room.

Such municipal ownership models have been pioneered by so-called ‘sharing cities’ such as Seoul, South Korea, which has restricted certain platforms while promoting the development of local alternatives. Municipal ownership is not strictly cooperative – it violates the cooperative principle of ‘autonomy and independence’, among others – but this approach recognizes that, as stewards of common infrastructure, governments are essential stakeholders in the platform economies that rely on such infrastructure to operate.

When a business serves the role of organizing and enabling the transactions throughout an entire sector of the economy, it has historically been regarded as either a monopoly or a public utility. Just as the monopolies of connective railroads inspired the U.S. antitrust laws of a century ago, a recognition is growing that new strategies of enforcement, and perhaps new laws, are needed to regulate the emerging online super-platforms (Khan, 2016). Enabling transitions to more democratic ownership designs may be a way to help these platforms better self-regulate, rather than inviting more stifling regulatory regimes.

Designing for the future

Cooperatives have often formed from a posture of reaction, of meeting unmet and essential needs, rather than anticipating desires or advertising them into existence. The growing movement for platform cooperativism, too, has tended toward imagining co-op versions of existing models, rather than wholesale innovations. While conservatism can be a strength and a source of stability, it will also be a liability in an evolving online economy of capital-rich enterprises competing for winner-take-all market share. Leading offline cooperatives have made a point of investing in innovation, and platform co-ops will need to do so all the more. To this end, Trebor Scholz has formed the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School to orchestrate research and funding specifically for this emerging sector. The Internet of Ownership maintains a library of legal templates and bylaws. And research initiatives like the EU’s P2Pvalue project are starting to incorporate platform cooperativism into their work as well. Such efforts face plentiful challenges.

Among the most visible platform co-ops in development, for instance, are cooperative taxi companies vying to compete with the likes of Uber. Companies like Green Taxi Cooperative in Denver, Alpha Taxis in Paris and ATX Coop Taxi in Austin are betting that they can provide better service with drivers fully committed to their work through various degrees of equity sharing, combined with their own app-based hailing technology. In the short term this strategy may have promise. However, Uber’s longer-term outlook appears to be premised on an eventual transition to self-driving cars – and an economy in which human driver-owners could turn into a cumbersome liability.

The question at hand, really: How do we cooperativize robots? It’s a challenge for domains well beyond transportation. The ‘internet of things’ – the growing industry of automated, networked gadgets, from watches to home temperature controls – poses problems of trust and surveillance that cooperative ownership could be especially well suited for, but only if they move into that new market quickly enough. Platform co-op researchers need to investigate more deliberately what potential innovations and business models investor-owned companies aren’t seeing because of the limitations of their own ownership structures.

Matters of intellectual property ownership take on fresh urgency as people invite artificial intelligence more fully into their lives through systems like Amazon’s Alexa. Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman, among others, have formed an organization called OpenAI to develop open-source artificial intelligence technoloegy, but, as with open-source software generally, this does not prevent value from flowing mainly to corporate investors. Peter Barnes (2006), on the other hand, has suggested that those who monetize our information commons could pay fees that would be redistributed equally to the population in the form of a universal dividend. And a team of computer scientists has proposed a preliminary model for artificial intelligence owned by the people whose data-labor trains it (Sriraman et al., 2017). The nature of democratic ownership design for a more automated future is by no means obvious, but investor control need not be a foregone conclusion.

Finally, an honest platform cooperativism should extend its gaze beyond the platform economy itself to its material substrates – in particular, the human conditions surrounding the mineral extraction and assembly of the hardware on which platforms depend. This has been neglected territory for the emerging platform co-op ecosystem, which has remained software-oriented. But there are some promising points of departure to consider. Fairphone is a Dutch smartphone, available in Britain through The Phone Co-op; it is designed with an ethical supply chain in mind, including decent working conditions and conflict-free minerals. The Indonesian co-op KDIM is building its own locally produced smartphone. In China, Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications hardware manufacturer, is significantly employee-owned – though it is neither a formal co-op nor a model for worker rights. Perhaps platform co-ops, by building other co-ops into their supply chains, can help set high standards for sourcing and labor. Further research is needed, however, to develop more democratic ownership designs for the hardware, natural resources and human labor on which any future platform economy will depend.

Ownership transitions

What would it take to have an economy in which a can-do entrepreneur with an idea for a platform – the kind of person who wants nothing more than to create something new and excellent and receive some fair compensation for succeeding – will conclude that her best way to proceed is by practicing democracy? The answer, of course, is that it would take a lot of things at once. Ownership design is best considered a process of open-ended choices, based on patterns that we test and apply iteratively. Integral to the designs themselves, therefore, are the processes for instantiating them.

There are two basic kinds of co-op development: startups and conversions. Startups that begin as co-ops from their inception have the chance to hard-wire cooperative values into their structures and cultures; they typically rely on the widespread recognition of an unmet need. Conversion, meanwhile, involves transitioning an existing enterprise to democratic ownership and governance, combining a proven business model and its existing momentum with a structure better aligned to serve the people who rely on it.

Startups might come in several forms. Some will be bootstrapped – drawing on existing communities of users to finance and populate a platform that meets their needs, perhaps through equity crowdfunding. Along these lines, venture capitalist Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures envisions a new generation of less risky ‘skinny platforms’ that deliver lower returns to investors and higher returns to labor. He told Shareable in 2015, ‘We can generate a return participating in that, and we think that’s what we should be doing’ (Geraci, 2015). Other kinds of startups, meanwhile, might spin off from existing cooperatives, online or off, perhaps connected by a federation or other forms of ongoing cooperation. For instance, the German cooperative marketplace platform Fairmondo is spreading to the UK through the aid of two existing cooperatives – Fairmondo itself and Worth Cooperating in the UK – with the intention of creating a freestanding multi-stakeholder co-op. Rather than growing as a multinational company, they’re replicating and sharing a common pool of open-source software.

Conversions, too, can come in various forms. One is a mature-stage transition. Especially when a product is unproven or lacks a ready community of users, a cooperative structure may not be the appropriate ownership design early on; it makes sense, then, that forward-thinking founders and investors should hold the risk, as well as the opportunity for reward. Once a community of users forms, however, the nature of the business changes, and cooperative ownership models become more appropriate – such as to govern labor policies or the use of personal data. A loyal and active community can provide founders with a fair return for their early innovation and investment; shared ownership, meanwhile, can help keep that community loyal and active and interested in their platform’s success. Another kind of conversion – more speculative and challenging, to be sure – could take place once a platform has achieved the sort of ubiquity that makes it, in essence, a monopoly-utility. For instance, as former Harvard Library director Robert Darnton contends (2009 and elsewhere), Google Books has created a unique and essential information commons by scanning and making available documents that may never be scanned again; a company whose chief responsibility is shareholder profit, however, does not seem to be the appropriate steward for an archive of such immesurable value. Similar concerns in the platform co-op networks have spurred a ‘BuyTwitter’ campaign, which calls on the company to convert to some form of user ownership. A new generation of antitrust policy might finance and aid transfers of platform ownership to the users who depend on them. Cooperative models are both proven and adaptive enough to merit consideration as we design and adopt – so far with too little foresight – the platform utilities of the twenty-first-century economy.

The extent of platform cooperativism at present remains limited to a rallying cry, a few success stories, and a cluster of far-flung, early-stage experiments. Merely saying that it should take hold more widely, as we advocates have attempted to do, is not enough to overcome the formidable barriers of financing, market access, public education and competition that this kind of model faces. Even a brief glance at the existing, offline cooperative economy – the credit unions, the electric utility co-ops, the farmers’ marketing and supply firms – makes clear that a more cooperative online economy would not guarantee utopian outcomes. But the achievements of past co-op sectors do at least suggest that such models are capable of scaling to reach and shape significant portions of economic life. When they do so, they furnish more resilient, institutionally diverse societies, impacting the behavior of non-cooperative enterprises as well as the lives of their members.

Insofar as platform cooperativism has been a scholarly project, it introduces questions that have been too often neglected in research on internet cultures and economies. How are platforms owned and governed, and how could they be owned and governed differently? How does their ownership shape the platforms’ structures of accountability? How do ownership models organize and limit the kinds of technologies available to people?

Thankfully, this has not been merely a scholarly project, but a participatory one. The emerging experiments have not merely followed the path called for or imagined by theory. That dynamism only reinforces the supposition, however, that when we reorient systems of ownership and governance toward democracy, transformative things can occur.

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Photo by Photographing Travis

The post An Internet of ownership: democratic design for the online economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create value. This included open-source software, all the open X movements inspired by open source, Creative Commons, the resurgence of an economy based on solidarity, the rise of carsharing, bikesharing, coworking, cohousing, open government, participatory budgeting, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, hackerspaces, and more. We were in the midst of a sharing transformation.

Soon, however, money began to pour into a handful of these tech start-ups, most notably Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber. The media quickly shifted its attention to them, and they became synonymous with the sharing economy. However, as the money rolled in, the communitarian element rolled out. Exploiting peer providers, purposely breaking regulations, strong-arming local governments, and unethical competitive tactics became the norm. The very thing that earned these start-ups traction in the first place — how they recast relationships between strangers in radically constructive terms — was sacrificed to growth. Instead, they became a particularly aggressive extension of business as usual.

Despite this, the real sharing economy did not disappear. We at Shareable helped catalyse two related movements to help draw resources to this real sharing economy. In 2011, we hosted Share San Francisco, the first event framing cities as platforms for sharing. The city of San Francisco incorporated our thinking into their Sharing Economy Working Group, which then inspired a former social justice activist and human rights lawyer, Mayor Park Won-soon of Seoul, South Korea, to launch Sharing Cities Seoul in 2012. Sharing City Seoul’s comprehensive package of regulations and programmes supported a localized version of the sharing economy where the commons, government, and market work together to promote sharing and the common good. Many cities have followed suit, including Amsterdam, London, Milan, Lisbon, Warsaw, five cities in Japan, and at least six other cities in South Korea. Last year, Mayor Park won the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development for his sharing cities work.

In late 2014, we published a feature story by Nathan Schneider, “Owning is the New Sharing,” which reported on an emerging trend — tech start-ups organizing themselves as cooperatives. This, together with a conference about platform cooperatives, proved the stimulus for a new movement. One of the cornerstone examples of this movement is Stocksy United, a growing online stock photo marketplace where the photographers own and control the business. In other words, Stocksy is a 21st-century worker cooperative. Another example is Fairmondo, a German eBay-like site for ethical products owned and controlled by sellers. It’s expanding by recruiting cooperatives in other countries to a federation of cooperatives that, together, will maintain local control of each country’s market through a single technology platform. Fairmondo exemplifies an approach to impact that philanthropists ignore because, too often, they are as obsessed with scale as any Silicon Valley venture capitalist and don’t see the virtue of impact through replication instead.

In this regard, philanthropists today should follow the instructive example of Edward Filene. Filene played a leading role in developing an institution that allowed ordinary people to build their own wealth — credit unions, a high-impact model that could be and has been replicated. Philanthropists should use their resources to help do the same across a whole range of new institutions including sharing cities, platform cooperatives, and much more. This will help ordinary people build and access wealth, reduce resource consumption, and reweave the social fabric. Now, that’s what I’d call a real sharing economy.

This piece was originally published on Alliance Magazine.

Photo by Avariel Falcon

The post To Create a Real Sharing Economy, Think Replication — Not Just Scale 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

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In the run-up to OPEN 2017, where Brianna will be speaking, Oliver Sylvester-Bradley explores her experiences of setting up and running a platform business as a co-op.

OSB: Why did you and your business partners decide to set up Stocksy as a co-op?

BW: Stocksy launched in 2013 in response to a desire to set up a business that put the power back into artists’ hands through shared ownership, transparency of business, and collaborative planning through AGMs, resolutions and ongoing forum discussions. This was an important mission for us after having worked at other stock photo agencies where we saw artists [the producer-workers] being disenfranchised by having royalty percentages clawed back with little control or stability over their futures – we wanted to change that.

We also wanted to change what “stock” meant in the creative world. We wanted to reinvigorate the passion in photography and design and change the landscape of the common content found in most stock collections. To achieve this shift we focused on the work we loved, what inspired us, and ensured content was hand-selected to guarantee a high calibre, while leaving behind all the tired cliches.

OSB: How did you obtain the funds required to set up and launch Stocksy?

BW: Stocksy was started with an initial private shareholder’s loan of $1.2 million from co-founders Bruce Livingstone and Brianna Wettlaufer. Working with a bootstrapped budget and a small but strong team, we were able to keep overhead costs low and reach profitability by our first year in business. We paid back the loan in full by 2015, in addition to paying out our first $200k USD in dividends to our members.

OSB: Stock photography, with distributed suppliers and customers transacting via an online platform, seems to fit very well with the Platform Co-op model and Stocksy is often referred to as one of the best examples of a viable, working, Platform Co-op. How practical do you think it is to imagine platform co-ops succeeding in other industries?

BW: The co-op model is incredibly complimentary to online platforms, we just need more leaders, executives and innovators who are interested in creating a financial model that benefits the many over pursuing millions for a select few or seeking to create a product designed with an exit strategy. As an old model that is becoming new again, there is still a lot of education and understanding to be created and shared around the benefits of trusting your community and investing through transparency as a business model.

…we just need more leaders, executives and innovators who are interested in creating a financial model that benefits the many over pursuing millions for a select few…

What we’ve experienced running Stocksy is that the accountability to our membership is no different than the reports required for investors or boards within traditional business models. The beauty of the member-shareholders is that they are not only incredibly familiar with what and how your product is used, but they’re additionally very focused (and therefore invested) on the long term vision and strategy for the business to achieve success. This creates incredibly valuable feedback and collaboration for your product, while maintaining its long term integrity.

Over the last year, we’ve had reach-outs from a number of incredibly unique businesses doing interesting and valuable work supported by communities of workers. Those communities include anything from engineers, artists, chefs and even scuba divers, all with inspiring ideas about how their collectives can set up business models to have better profit sharing. We’ve yet to see any limitations around exploring a profit sharing model in any industry; the “how” just has to be adapted to serve each community and their needs – how they gather feedback, achieve transparency, and have a profit sharing model that still maintains not just the financial sustainability of the members, but the business as well.

OSB: How did you find the process of establishing a co-op?

BW: It was definitely an exploratory process setting up an online platform as a co-op back in 2013/14. We had legal advice but there weren’t a lot of established practices or businesses that we could look to as examples. So we approached it with the same goals as you would a normal business, establishing bylaws that support and protect the long term success of the business and our members.

The one thing we knew that could hinder a business was taking democracy to an extreme at the expense of experts being unable to do their jobs, operate efficiently, and in the world of tech, be able to move and adapt quickly to business demands and challenges.

We, of course, always aim for 100% support from our members in everything that we do, but not being able to move forward without unanimous support or participation would be unrealistic.

Another common considerations is how you’ll put value on shares. In our case, we value them at $1 USD, and a share is a share, so you can’t own more in order to have more voting power.

Lastly, you’ll need to outline what onboarding and offboarding means to you. Do members have to meet a certain criteria in order to keep their membership? If they don’t meet that criteria, how aggressive will you be to cull your membership – and is that a sustainable solution?

OSB: Most people think setting up a co-op is harder than setting up a Ltd company – what would you say to them?

BW: Setting up an Ltd may initially seem easier by virtue of its familiarity and I hope one day setting up a co-op is held in the same regard.

The difficulty, like any business, will likely be the resources you initially have available. In the instance of a co-op, you need a product and a community from the outset, which poses different challenges than a traditional business model. You have to be extremely pragmatic about how you grow and prioritize those two things. Focus too heavily on having a community first and your product may suffer. Focus too much on your product without enough engagement or governance and you may not build the momentum and investment from your community to create a successful product.

The answer to that challenge will be unique to every business.

OSB: What other advice would you have for anyone who is thinking about setting up a co-op?

BW: Don’t feel inundated or overwhelmed by getting your legal perfect or over-documenting rules in the beginning. Set up bylaws that ensure transparency, accountability and engagement, but don’t over-define it. Be ready to trust and explore the parameters and measures you need with your community as it grows, evolves and develops its own culture, and then be able and willing to adapt to ensure the success of the business.

But really, I will emphasize trust. Choosing to set up your business as a co-op means you have to truly believe in absolute accountability to your community. When you set up your business to invest in open conversations from the beginning, your ROI will pay itself back twofold. Don’t be afraid of varied opinions or worry you may lose control of the company by having co-owners. Being a co-op creates deeper purpose and a richer experience when building a product that you believe in.

Being a co-op creates deeper purpose and a richer experience when building a product that you believe in.

OSB: People often think it must be really hard to make decisions and achieve consensus if everyone gets a say in how a business is run. How do you make decision at Stocksy?

BW: I think one of the big points of confusion is understanding what a business driven community resolution process looks like. We use our forums and resolution mechanisms to gauge and understand ideas, product direction or issues that need to be addressed. This often requires a deep dive in conversation to assess proposals and understand the pervasive needs within the community.

Common mistakes to watch out for are solution proposals that lack true understanding of what they are trying to solve. It is the business’ (and board of directors) responsibility to facilitate that conversation to make sure that everyone has comprehensive insight into the why of a problem or challenge.

As a business, once we’ve identified the issue or idea that we’re trying to address or solve, as experts in their fields, it is the business professionals who conclude the how that follows. This isn’t to say we don’t love input from our members, but ultimately the business needs to access ideas and scope, how it relates to a product roadmap and goal strategies, and report that back to the community of shareholders.

OSB: So, I presume you are a multi-stakeholder co-op with different classes of members?

BW: Indeed we are a multi-stakeholder co-op. From conversations I’ve had with others working in/with cooperatives, I’ve often heard multi-stakeholders are a less commonly used setup, but this model works especially well in the platform co-op sector. It allows every level of people involved to be stakeholders, in our case that is:

• Class A – Founders and advisors (5 max)
• Class B – Staff (a latter development after we realised how hard and invested our staff were in helping grow the business, we realised they needed the same sense of ownership as our members. Early founding staff are represented here, and new staff that complete 2 years of commitment are now eligible.) (20 max)
• Class C – Our artists membership (1,000 max)

OSB: And how do decisions actually get made?

BW: Our goal is decisions are a continuous conversation that allows us to always be adapting and improving upon what we’re doing. This has definitely gotten more challenging as our membership has grown and headquarters takes on more layers and responsibility as the business scales. This is currently a huge priority for us, improving our monthly member newsletter, monthly/quarterly reporting on analytics, facilitating conversation from submitted resolutions by our membership (a process that’s open year round) now lead by our VP of Operations, one of our most recent changes in communication. We’ve explored multiple staff and roles to make our resolution process as engaged and timely as possible, but its definitely challenging making this a seamless process. We’re really excited to be connecting our members directly with a person on our executive team, in particular the person responsible for managing our backlog of priorities and working with departments to create solid documentation in order for projects to get prioritised.

The resolution process is there to identify new business opportunities, improving upon our existing product, as a means to improving our co-op and member engagement, etc. Something that’s important working together collaboratively and in as flat of a hierarchy as possible is that we still respect the business experts so they can bring their experience and expertise, but they can only do that when a resolution successfully identifies the problem it’s trying to solve first vs. jumping to the solution.

OSB: From your experiences, how would you compare decision making within a co-op structure to that within a Ltd Company?

BW: Being accountable to a community vs. a board of removed executives or VCs, is hands down my preferred method. Accountability to a community creates a much richer and more fulfilling experience. Having an engaged community drives business in a direction that you can always feel good about at the end of the day.

I will note, you have to invest in the education and communication with your community first, which can be more work up front than a traditional Ltd company, but in the long run it amasses a group of people that share a common value set and ethos which generates the framework for attainable and sustainable company trajectories.

OSB: What software do you use to manage Stocksy?

BW: Stocky’s online platform for transaction, managing our content library and managing our online community is all custom built.

On the day to day, we use JIRA as our project management system across all departments and Google Docs for collaborative documentation.

All staff and remote contractors use Slack everyday to maintain constant communication.

And we all keep energy up by sharing music through Spotify.

OSB: Do you use any open source software?

BW: Our controlled vocabulary is based on Wordnet, an open source dictionary / lexical database from Princeton.

OSB: You seem to be a fan of democracy, as am I, however, I’m not sure I have ever experienced it. What do you think real democracy is?

BW: Democracy, to me, is creating a system that values fairness. It levels the playing field across all walks of life involved, so that everyone can feel heard and have a say in the control of their futures. A democratic system is enforced by shared accountability that invests in creating success for the many, (vs. the few), by championing support, mentorship and education so that everyone’s involvement in the system can be as valuable as possible. Finally, I think democracy aims to create a feeling of respect, pride, ownership and end goal of sustainability through focusing on the long terms goals.

Democracy is creating a system that values fairness… so that everyone can feel heard and have a say in the control of their futures.

OSB: We are often exposed to the vision of a world full of hate and extremism and scarcity but rarely hear about a positive alternative. If platform co-ops, the solidarity / generative economy take hold it strikes me we could be living in a very different world in the future. Can you describe what you think this world might look like?

BW: I think the co-op model, as an old model becoming new again, provides amazing opportunities for companies looking to achieve both a more collaborative and financial model that creates deeper purpose and involvement. To envision a world where everyone is using the co-op model I would say is taking one extreme and replacing it with another. It’s important to celebrate diversity and individuality as a key component to fostering innovation and we need a variety of approaches, models and ideas to achieve that and maintain that my momentum. My ultimate hope is that as more Platform Co-ops are created and more people become familiar with it’s structure, it will become something more common that more entrepreneurs will turn to.

Deloitte Global’s sixth annual Millennial Survey stated, “76 percent say businesses, in general, are having a positive impact on the wider society in which they operate”, and that they “view business positively and believe it’s behaving in an increasingly responsible manner”; however, “Overall, only 36 percent of millennials expect the social/political situations in their countries to improve during the next 12 months.” Which I think demonstrates that our values in business are changing, but it’s up to us to make that difference happen.

OSB: What do you see as the main stepping stones for this vision to become a reality?

BW: There seems to be a lack of easily accessible information about co-ops and this lack of information makes it difficult for more companies (and people) to become familiar with it’s values and structure. A next stepping stone is to use the momentum that cooperatives currently have to connect with educational institutions to include cooperative education within programs for the next generation. This will ensure that students are entering the workforce with a functional knowledge of the ethics of values they can bring as entrepreneurs and executives.

As more Platform Co-ops gain traction, we’re seeing many come together to combine knowledge and experience to empower other co-ops. My hope is we start seeing tech based co-op incubators, mentor programs and investment programs to support the next wave.

OSB: At The Open Co-op we’re working with The Hive, a co-op incubator here in the UK, so hopefully the change you describe is beginning to happen! Thank you for your time Brianna, we look forward to hearing from you at OPEN 2017 and we wish you every success with Stocksy.

Cross-posted from The Open Coop

The post “Creating a financial model that benefits the many over the few” – A Q&A with Brianna Wettlaufer, CEO of Stocksy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

History provides ample proof. For as long as there has been art, artists have worked together to support each others’ projects and sustain their livelihoods. Early examples include the medieval guilds of Europe, where artisans such as stonemasons and glaziers worked together to meet their common needs. Artist collectives have also been around for centuries. Contemporary versions range in size from just a few members to scores who produce art individually or collaboratively and exhibit their works in shows together.

The tradition of artists banding together is alive and well today. Below are three examples of artist forming worker cooperatives to support themselves and their work at a time of increasing economic precarity.

1. Stocksy United

Photo: Screenshot of Stocksy United’s home page, a collage of sample curated images.

Perhaps the most well-known example is Stocksy United. As an online stock photo image company, they’re also one of the largest artist cooperatives around with over 900 photographer-owners. Nathan Schneider, scholar in residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a leading expert on platform cooperatives, notes that Stocksy has created a “formidable cooperative platform by sharing ownership with photographers — enabling the business to put artistic integrity ahead of the usual imperative of short-term growth.”

Stocksy’s forbearer was the for-profit stock photo company, iStock — which even back then was an enterprise that prided itself in being “by creatives, for creatives.” In 2006, the company was sold to Getty Images for $50 million. Under the new ownership, fees to photographers were cut and the culture of artistic camaraderie vanished.

A few years later, the founders of iStock decided to use the money from the sale of iStock to form Stocksy, a stock photo site formed as a worker cooperative owned and governed by its contributing photographers. This would ensure photographers were paid fairly and had a say in the business over the long term.

Their origin story is unique, since it’s rare for a digital media platform to share ownership and governance with its contributors. The funds from the sale of iStock certainly made it easier to launch Stocksy, but the key was the pre-existence of the iStock photographer community that was eager to build and own an enterprise together.

Other artists may not have the same access to capital or community as Stocksy. Two more co-ops, CoLab and Meerkat Media Collective, demonstrate other ways in which creative professionals can come together to form their own thriving, collectively-owned businesses.

2. CoLab

Photo: Members of the the CoLab cooperative in their office.

CoLab is a worker-owned digital agency that designs and develops websites and apps for mission driven organizations and entrepreneurs. It was founded in Ithaca, NY in 2010 by Rylan Peery and Ralph Cutler. Peery had studied co-ops as a Stanford undergraduate, during which he spent over a year and a half visiting cooperative businesses across Latin America. In the late 1990’s, he worked in venture capital and raised money as a tech start-up entrepreneur. Of these two experiences, Peery says that he became “keenly aware of the limitations and challenges of the conventional technology start-up paradigm,” and that he “carried seeds of a possible solution inspired by the sustainable economic development work” from his exposure to cooperative systems during college.

Cutler, who was an old friend of Peery’s, was also working in the design industry. Though the agency he co-led with another partner was doing well, he says that “it lacked depth, vision and a higher mission.” Even though it felt collective in nature, Cutler felt restless. “I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time but I was unfulfilled.”

In 2009, Peery and Cutler began collaborating on some design projects. It became clear that they shared the same vision for the kind of creative agency they wanted to build. So in 2010, with the help of co-op development resources and a supportive community, they converted Peery’s traditional business into a cooperative.

Since then, CoLab has grown to more than 25 workers and worker-owners. They’ve met potential members through meet-ups, conferences, co-working spaces, and the like. Once they found a promising candidate, they’d collaborate on a project to know them and see if it was a match. “From there everything can flow quite organically into co-op membership, but the fundamentals of being open to exploring new connections and relations is the foundation,” Peery explained.

As a cooperative, they make all of their decisions democratically through a three-fold process: working group meetings on specific project issues, board meetings for decisions that require the involvement of all their members, and the Loomio app to make day-to-day decisions. Overall, they strive for a “lean democracy” where all members can participate in governance or are represented by designees. They also offer leadership training for all members to better support a democratic workplace. The team at CoLab plans on a further expansion of their cooperative enterprise by creating a performance arts and studio co-op in Ithaca that merges visual and interactive arts.

3. Meerkat Media

Image: Still from Meerkat Media Collective’s short documentary about the People’s Climate March called Into the Streets.

Across the state from Ithaca is the Meerkat Media Collective in Brooklyn New York. Meerkat started as an informal collective in 2005 between 12 college friends who all had backgrounds in film and activism. The collective started as a means to share resources and support each other through their individual freelance video projects. While each filmmaker succeeded in their respective careers, they wanted to find a way to funnel the money they received from their hired contracts into their own individual passion-projects. They had been working as a collective, but they didn’t have a shared bank account or operating budget.

That’s why Meerkat Media Collective eventually became a more formal collective of artists-in-residence and a worker cooperative film production company. Their projects include documentaries and web videos for publishers, universities, and non-profits. As they strive to produce high-quality films for impact, they also provide their members with a sustainable income and humane work environment.

The co-op arm of Meerkat was launched by half of the original collective’s members in 2010. The six founders incorporated as an LLC where each of them became equal partner-owners of the enterprise. Co-founder Zara Serabian-ArthurIt told me that it was easy for them to transition into a co-op because the founding members had already been making films together in a collaborative way.

Their collaborative way of doing things has evolved to the point that they rotate roles for any given film between director, editor, and shooter. Unless a client specifically requests a certain style, which may be one of the members’ unique strengths, they do this rotation to make sure all of their skills continue to develop and that no one gets pigeonholed into one role or style of filmmaking.

Their residency program is made up of independent artists that actively work on film projects, individually or collaboratively, with the collective’s support, resources, and equipment. Residents also support each other’s projects, receive a monetary stipend, and attend an annual creative retreat. The residency program and co-op have a strong reciprocal relationship. The program is funded by the co-op and residents have access to shared office space and equipment. In turn, the residency offers the co-op access to a new talent.

The Meerkat co-op makes most of their collective decisions through meetings, which happen at least three times a week. They hold a full-day strategic planning meeting once a month, and for small every day issues, they also use the decision-making software Loomio.

Serabian-Arthur thinks that co-ops are a great fit for artists and creative professionals. “As artists trying to imagine a different kind of world, it makes sense that we’d apply that thinking and commitment to our work and process,” she explained. “I also think that artists are especially prone to be open to experimentation, to taking risks and trying something new. Many artists I meet are excited about the idea, but I haven’t met many people adopting a similar model — I think in part because we’re not exposed to many examples of creative cooperatives that we can learn from.”

Restoring the Cooperative Tradition

Schneider notes that the historical tradition of artists using collective organizing goes back centuries. “Probably for as long as there have been artists, there has been a recognition that the design of ownership structures go hand-in-hand with what it takes to be truly creative. In the medieval period, artisans formed guilds to ensure that they could protect their economic security and their creative integrity.” Schneider says that in the time since, artists have formed salons, collectives, gift economies and cooperatives. “Even in the most capitalist of societies, artists have nourished these models for the same reasons.”

Despite this legacy of art collectives, navigating the process of setting up a cooperative enterprise is a new and complicated process. The founders of CoLab and Meerkat Media both mentioned how helpful it was to have some guidance from the outside. Peery and Cutler worked with LIFT to get coaching on the vision of their organization, and said it was one of the reasons they were able to make the leap from traditional business to cooperative.

Support has also come from local government. In 2014, New York’s City Council voted to support the development of worker-owned businesses and directed $1.2 million dollars towards expanding existing worker co-ops and developing new ones. The Worker Cooperative Business Development Initiative funded training plus technical, legal and financial assistance to current and potential co-op members. According to the Democracy at Work Institute, it was the largest U.S. city investment in worker cooperatives to date. In 2015 the Council invested an additional $2.1 million into the initiative and in one and a half years, tripled the number of worker co-ops from 20 to 67. Due to such resounding success, the City Council renewed and expanded funding for the initiative again this year.

Serabian-Arthur of Meerkat Media noted that their co-op directly benefitted from this Initiative, noting that the training and resources that the city has funded, along with the supportive cooperative ecosystem that has emerged alongside the New York City trade association for worker co-op businesses, have been extremely helpful to keep them going.

What’s clear is that it doesn’t take much to plant the seed of democratic workplace ownership among artists, and that having the right support can go a long way. Peery believes that since artists and creatives value collaboration and experimentation more so than other professions, creative professionals might be particularly amenable to the co-op model. “Creatives likely also recognize more so than other professionals the value of collaboration in fostering innovation and excellence. My hope is that creatives can model the value of radical collaboration through cooperative work for other professions.”

Schneider echoes this sentiment, pointing out that artists’ willingness to explore the frontiers of new sustainable, democratic economic models is an advantage for all of us. “As has happened again and again, we are all benefiting from the economic designs that artists have created for themselves by necessity, and by the willingness to treat economics, too, as a medium for creativity.”

Top photo: Members of CoLab

The post Art Co-ops and the Power of Mobilizing Collaboration for Creativity appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As “death star platforms” such as Airbnb and Uber continue their pursuit of global domination, an alternative is rising in its wake.

Platform cooperatives, which share the value they create with the users they depend on, are on the rise. As Shareable co-founder Neal Gorenflo writes in How Platform Co-ops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy, “Platform coops combine a cooperative business structure with an online platform to deliver a real-world service.”

Gorenflo asks, “What if Uber was owned and governed by its drivers? What if Airbnb was owned and governed by its hosts?” We don’t have to wait to find out. A growing number of platform cooperatives are making their presence known on a global scale. Below are just 11 platform co-ops that are changing the way people organize, run businesses, create value, and share the wealth. There are many more.

1. Fairmondo

Fairmondo is a digital, co-operative version of eBay, where sellers on the platform are also its owners. Launched by Felix Weth in Germany in 2013, the platform is, as Chelsea Rustrum writes, “rooted in an ethos of open source, open innovation, and a commons-based society. It has funded itself through a series of successful crowdfunding campaigns that have raised hundreds of thousands of Euros in member equity.”

To scale globally, the Fairmondo team plans to create an international network of country-based co-ops feeding into the Fairmondo platform.

2. Stocksy

Stocksy is a stock photo site where contributing photographers are also owners. A “highly curated collection” of royalty-free stock photos, the platform is a cooperative that believes in creative integrity, fair profit sharing, co-ownership, and every voice being heard. It’s a new twist on traditional co-ops. As they state on the website, “Think more artist respect and support, and less patchouli.”

Contributing Stocksy photographers receive 50% of a Standard License Purchase and 75% of an Extended License Purchase. Every Stocksy contributor receives a share of the company.

3. Backfeed

Backfeed is a platform to create platform cooperatives, all powered by the blockchain. Backfeed bills itself as, “a social operating system for decentralized organizations.” It enables massive, open-source collaboration without central coordination. Using a blockchain-based operating system, the Israeli company’s infrastructure comprises decentralized management tools, equity-sharing schemes, crowdsourcing mechanisms, and instruments for the collaborative evaluation and curation of content.

With a goal to enable the bootstrapping of decentralized organizations on top of the blockchain as easily as deploying a website, Backfeed can fuel a variety of ventures, including “decentralized journalism, insurance, ride-sharing applications and any other enterprise that would benefit from the decentralized, indirect coordination of large groups of individuals.”

4. Juno

Photo: Nancy Xu (CC-BY)

A ridesharing company that is taking on Uber, Juno has reserved 50% of its equity for platform drivers. The company is being built by an experienced team of startup veterans, including founder Talmon Marco, who sold his messaging app Viber to Rakuten for $900 million, and is well-funded with backing coming from Viber founders rather than outside VCs.

The New York City-based startup, which recently launched service in the Big Apple, is reportedly only taking a 10% commission of each ride (Uber takes 20-35%), and is giving drivers the option to be contractors or employees (if they want to be exclusive to Juno).

5. Union Taxi

Union Taxi in Denver, Colorado, a driver-owned taxi cooperative, represents a growing trend. Drivers are increasingly organizing taxi cooperatives for better pay and working conditions than what traditional taxi companies and Uber can offer. They also must compete successfully. Union Taxi appears to be doing both. They offer a convenient service with e-hailing (like Uber) and driver ownership and control of the business.

CWA (Communications Workers of America) Local 7777 helped the drivers form the cooperative and plays an ongoing support role. By driving for Union, cab drivers cut their car lease rate by two-thirds. As Lisa Bolton, president of the union told Shareable, “By far, the biggest advantage was the lease rate.” This enabled drivers to work less, “which gives them more time at home. They were taking home a lot more of their money that they were making, and everybody was contributing the same amount to the business.”

PDX Yellow Cab is a similar taxi cooperative in Portland, Oregon, where Somali cab drivers broke away from traditional cab companies to form their own—the first major Somali-owned business in Portland. Union Cab Cooperative in Portland is also fairly new (pictured above), though neither cooperative offer e-hailing yet.

6. VTC Cab

After Uber cut fares across Paris, some of its drivers created a competing service, VTC Cab. Modeled after Uber, the ride-sharing platform aims to give drivers more control over their business and provide passengers an opportunity to support a French company.

As the app’s founder, Mohammed Radi, told the Verge, “We want to re-establish and regain our rights over Uber. Uber is not representative of our community… They are a technology company which has no connection with the world of transportation. So they treat human beings like a number — you know, like a figure on a computer. And being a number, as a driver, it’s a very bad feeling.”

7. Modo

Modo is a Vancouver-based consumer car sharing co-op. Launched in 1997, with just two cars and 16 members, Modo has grown to 16,000 members and a fleet of over 500 sports cars, sedans, trucks, SUVs, vans and hybrids—all available to share at $4/hour through a smartphone app and website. Member-owners are shareholding members of the co-op which means they get a vote as well as the best rates for carsharing.

8. Timefounder

Timefounder is a “fair and elegant equity split system where you will love to wake up and work on projects you will end up owning with the rest of the team members.” The app allows founders to be fair with the people who invest time in a project and allows experts to invest time in projects and get future shares or others benefits. Based in Barcelona, the Timefounder team aims to “enable collaboration with fair equity split.”

9. Enspiral

Enspiral is a collective of social enterprises and freelancers that makes, uses, and distributes free apps for decision making and budgeting. Based in New Zealand, the platform, which is self-described as a “sort of a ‘DIY’ social enterprise support network,” has a goal to help their organization, as well as other organizations and movements, run democratically. As the website states, “If you’re an independent, entrepreneurial person with a deep commitment to service and social change and want to discover your own way to have an impact alongside like-minded people, Enspiral is fertile ground.”

10. Tapazz

Tapazz is a peer to peer carsharing co-op in Belgium. A recognized cooperative company, it enables shareholders who believe in the company’s social mission (to ensure a sustainable mobility society) to participate in its growth. Shareholders can invest, produce and create a transparent structure to ensure sustainable mobility. As an added bonus, Tapazz “offers space for co-creating and collaboration, so it really is a business of everyone.”

11. Peerby

Peerby is a Dutch neighbor-to-neighbor goods sharing platform. The company recently raised $2.2 million from users in a recent crowdfunding campaign, which makes users the majority shareholder class.

A certified B corp, Peerby plans to use the funds, which surpasses the total venture capital dollars the startup raised previously and makes it one of the most successful international crowdfunding campaigns ever, for product development and international expansion of a new business model named Peerby Go, with a specific focus on the UK and North America.

What are your favorite platform co-ops? Please share in the comments.

Cross-posted from Shareable.net and authored by Cat Johnson

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