A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

The post The Future of Work – Jobs and Automation in Estonia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Watch the video if you haven’t already and visit our site for further info:
www.we-guild.co.uk

Remember that it’s a project in the making and it needs your support! So you can help make it happen by doing all that social media stuff (liking, following and especially sharing it!) and join the mailing list.
Or if you can think of other ways to support us we’d love to hear from you.

Let’s make We-Guild happen!

Reposted from  We-Guild’s website

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A session in progress at the CrowdLaw conference at the Rockefeller Foundation conference center in Bellagio, Italy

In this session on ‘Transparency and Participation’ at the Bellagio conference on Crowdlaw: People-Led Innovation in Urban Lawmaking (March 13–17, 2018), we discussed whether participation depended on more transparency and whether transparency could be counter-productive to more engagement. I had the pleasure of speaking and moderating a conversation with:

• Mukhelani Dimba, Open Government Partnership
• Julia Keutgen,Westminster Foundation for Democracy
• Hélène Landemore, Yale University
• Veronica Seguel, Chamber of Deputies Chile

Transparency is instrumental for participation and for accountability. But in order to delve into the linkages between transparency and participation with discernment, it is necessary to clarify the concept of ‘transparency’. Transparency is the immediate visibility for citizens of all policy related aspects. It is the contrary of opacity but is can be compatible with a certain closure. It is more demanding that publicity. It can help citizens to engage in policy, be instrumental to accountability and be educational and transformative for citizens. Transparency helps citizens to know and understand whether their government is protecting their rights and delivering on public services. It can range from total transparency to partial transparency. In some cases, partial transparency has been used by governments and parliaments to justify certain decisions. But when transparency is only partial, it cannot be expected to deliver good outcomes as citizens voice their opinion without having the full picture.

Transparency and participation should be regulated by law, including through Freedom of Information laws and the rules of procedure of parliament. In Brazil, for instance, the rules of procedure of parliament state the obligation for citizens to participate in committee hearings. That being said, there is not a single legal provision of transparency that could grant access to full access to information. Even when regulated by law, the utopian possibilities of transparency as a means to inclusiveness, universality and transformation, are simply not borne out in reality. For instance, today there is no evidence that Freedom of Information laws on their own have dramatically improved government transparency, responsiveness and accountability.

Transparency mostly operates in circumstances of high inequality. In these circumstances, having more transparency does not mean that there are better dialogues between government/parliaments and citizens. In this sense, transparency can lead to more inequality and elite capture because only those who have access to resources and the information are able to participate. Ultimately, participation rests on access to information. Where there are information asymmetries, only voices and interests of the resource rich are audible.

Transparency should be accompanied by civic education and procedural language of government and parliament should be translated meaningfully to citizen to enable meaningful their participation. Participation channels should be linked to citizen’s interest on a single issue rather than party politics. In Chile, for instance, the parliament has developed an online tool “Ley fácil” (easy law) to make the law understandable for ordinary citizens (https://www.bcn.cl/leyfacil).

Transparency is not always the most efficient way to improve a legitimate participatory process and can be very time consuming. Some scholars have even gone further and argued that it has a counterproductive effect on democracy. Even if relative transparency is achieved, there are questions regarding the quality of participation (who participates and how, with what degree of sincerity) and the quantity of participation (how many people participate). This is for instance the case in Chile, where public hearings organized by the parliament are mostly attended by men with a legal background and living in the capital and the voices of other stakeholders are not being heard.

Transparency makes compromises between representatives more difficult. When discussions are transparent and public, it can harden negotiating positions and make it difficult for elected officials to compromise. Citizens are mostly in favour or against a single issue, while legislation requires compromises and trade-offs between single issues. The more trade-offs are involved, the more trade-offs are required the more difficult it is to have full transparency of the negotiation that led to the compromise. Finally, too much transparency coupled with a lack of understanding of parliamentary/governmental processes, for instance disclosure of donations, can have a dampening effect on participation and lead to increased lack of trust in the institutions and its systems.

In the end, participants agreed that transparency is the ideal default principle, with instrumental value, but should be compatible with exceptions. It should not in itself represent a judgement of democracy.

Julia Keutgen is ‎a Technical Advisor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD)

Cross-posted from Govlab.org

Photo by sniggitysnags

The post CrowdLaw: Transparency and Participation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Aaron Fernando: Blockchain has become one of those buzzwords that commands attention and carries a powerful social glow, yet in the likes of similar buzzwords that have attained such a prized status, it has lost much of its meaning. Blockchain has become a catchall term for just about any digital ledger system regardless of crucial variations in its design. With so many blockchain projects ranging from social impact initiatives to opportunistic marketing ploys, it can be difficult to discern which projects hold real potential. For this reason, here’s a deep dive on blockchain applications in our niche: social impact.

The volatility in the price of cryptocurrencies doesn’t matter to restaurateur Helena Fabiankovic, who started Baba’s Pierogies in Brooklyn with her partner Robert in 2015. Yet she and her business are already positioned to reap the real-world benefits of the technology that underpins these digital currencies — the blockchain — and they will be at the forefront  of a sustainable, community-based peer-to-peer energy revolution because of it.

So what does a restaurateur have to do with the blockchain and local energy? Fabiankovic is one of the early participants in the Brooklyn Microgrid, a project of the startup LO3 Energy that uses a combination of innovative technologies — blockchain and smart meters — to operate a virtual microgrid in the borough of Brooklyn in New York City, New York. This microgrid enables residents to buy and sell green energy directly to their neighbors at much better rates than if they only interacted with centralized utility providers.

Photo of Helena Fabianokovic of Baba’s Pierogies courtesy of LO3

Just as we don’t pay much attention to the critical infrastructure that powers our digital world and exists just out of sight — from the Automated Clearing House (ACH), which undergirds our financial system, to the undersea cables that enable the Internet to be globally useful, blockchain is likely to change our lives in ways that will eventually be invisible. In the sharing economy, we have traditionally just used existing infrastructure and built platforms and services on top of it. Considering that those undersea cables are owned by private companies with their own motives and that the locations of ACH data centers are heavily classified, there is a lot to be desired in terms of transparency, resilience, and independence from self-interested third parties. That’s where open-source, decentralized infrastructure of the blockchain for the sharing economy offers much promise and potential.

In the case of Brooklyn Microgrid, which is part of an emerging model for shared energy use via the blockchain, this decentralized infrastructure would allow residents like Fabiankovic to save money and make sustainable choices. Shared ownership and community financing for green infrastructure like solar panels is part of the model. “Everyone can pay a different amount and you can get a proportional amount of energy that’s put off by the panel, based on how much that you own,” says Scott Kessler, director of business development at LO3. “It’s really just a way of crowdfunding an asset.”

The type of blockchain used by the Brooklyn Microgrid makes it possible to collect and communicate data from smart meters every second, so that the price of electricity can be updated in real time and users will still transact with each other using U.S. dollars. The core idea of the Brooklyn Microgrid is to utilize a tailored blockchain to align energy consumption with energy production, and to do this with rapidly-updated price information that then changes behavior around energy.

One of the Brooklyn Microgrid’s core goals is to upend traditional energy pricing and change people’s energy use by adjusting pricing in real time. All of this happens on a local level, between neighbors. “I really like the idea of the community sourcing energy to one another,” Fabiankovic says. “I thought it was a smart way of sourcing energy, and we try our best to maintain sustainability as well, whenever we can. So this is just another way to do that.”

Localizing the energy grid is indeed a smart way of sourcing energy that also offers a way to reduce a neighborhood’s carbon footprint. “What we’re trying to do is create a real tight market that reflects the time value and the locational value of where energy is used,” says Scott Kessler, director of business development at LO3. The Brooklyn Microgrid utilizes LO3’s hardware, but it’s the blockchain-based software that really does the legwork, providing a kind of infrastructure layer for the energy-sharing economy. LO3 is not the only organization doing this — groups like Power Ledger, Swytch, and WePower, are experimenting with other versions of blockchain-based P2P energy grids.

Photo of LO3 founder Lawrence Orsini, courtesy of LO3

What exactly is a blockchain?

Before diving further into the uses of the blockchain in shared enterprises, let’s take a quick look at how exactly this emerging technology operates. In its original form, the term blockchain refers to a type of database that is permanent, public, distributed and uses cryptography for security. Here, distributed means that multiple computers simultaneously update and store data once they have come to a consensus about which data makes the cut. Permanent and public means that all changes to this type of database will be visible to all, going back to the moment the database was started.

Yet there are exceptions, and the term blockchain is becoming increasingly vague as many networks marketed as using “blockchain” are often not public or distributed in any meaningful way. Crucially, not all blockchains have a native cryptocurrency, which are the exchangeable digital money-like units with a market price. For blockchains that do have a native cryptocurrency, units of cryptocurrency are usually issued into existence as incentives for running and securing the network. This occurs either through a process of repeated, energy-intensive computations called “mining” or through other means.

Mining has fueled criticism about some blockchains’ enormous use of electricity, especially mining on the Bitcoin blockchain which eats up more energy than many countries. The practice of mining however, is becoming outdated as more efficient mechanisms of securing blockchains crop up. Moreover, as demonstrated by up-and-coming sharing economy entities that utilize blockchains, the technology isn’t limited just for speculative assets like Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. Organizations around the globe are finding innovative ways to use blockchain for as a mechanism for good, providing the powerful rails that the sharing economy of the future runs on.

Blockchain for a better economy

One organization creating these rails is Origin, which is working to reduce the cost, difficulty, and barriers to entry for building marketplaces, enabling people to build truly peer-to-peer marketplaces on the blockchain. In creating this kind of decentralized underpinning, blockchains offer communities alternatives to one-size-fits all solutions and economies of scale.

“Decentralization will enable people to self-organize and have more unique or highly-localized offerings,” says Coleman Maher, who handles Origin’s partnerships. “It’s convenient from a user experience perspective, in some ways, that AirBnB is the exact same experience in San Francisco as it is in Rio de Janeiro as it is in Tokyo. But all those cities have different cultural environments, regulatory environments, and different specialized, local concerns. It doesn’t really make sense that the same organization is running the home-share market in these three, vastly different cities. We think it makes sense that home-sharers host self-organized get-togethers and say, ‘Hey, we want to have our own home-sharing decentralized marketplace that’s fair to us and fair to our guests. We don’t want to have to play by AirBnB’s rules.'”

Another crucial part of the sharing economy infrastructure is financial infrastructure. Consider the two billion unbanked and underbanked adults around the world. Can blockchain benefit them as well? WeTrust is one of the blockchain startups working to do this, and has already put out a lending circle product on Ethereum, the second most popular blockchain after Bitcoin.

Lending circles (also called money pools, tandas, susus, chit funds, and a whole lot of other things depending where in the world you are) facilitate shared community finance and peer-to-peer credit for those who do not have the ability to take out bank loans. Plus, lending circles have “been around and used by millions of unbanked people for millennia,” says Jake Kuczeruk, former director of partnerships at WeTrust. Lending circles are democratic and allow people to lend to their peers without requiring any financial institution to mediate them — practically, at least. Regulation is another story. Still, “most of these circles are being done with cash, with fiat currency, which obviously has some real safety and security issues, not to mention just being crazy inconvenient,” Kuczeruk says.

Since blockchain can deal with these issues, reduce administrative costs, and increase transparency, WeTrust sees potential in applying this technology to people’s existing behavior around finances. “We’re realistic here,” he says. “Bitcoin and blockchain technology in general only have about a 15 million person ecosystem. Obviously the global unbanked/underbanked aren’t really familiar with this technology yet … But now we’ve reached a point where it’s like ‘Hey, this is live. Let’s sit down together, we’ll walk you though this.’ Because at the end of the day, we want to make this as easy to use as Venmo.”

Other startups are taking a different approach. Companies like Kora are making the blockchain immediately accessible to populations in need of financial services by finding ways to integrate it with technologies they already use, such as mobile phones.

In addition to creating what is effectively an open-source payments infrastructure, Kora has been working directly with a range of groups — from farmers in Nigeria to coffee producers in Peru to a cooperative in Bangladesh — to make financial products that are accessible and work for groups that may otherwise go without them. The blockchain allows these groups to access financial services at a lower cost, increase transparency around where their funds are and how they get used, and allow projects to scale up more easily. “We just think about what users need, and then blockchain just happens to be a nice way to get there,” Maomao Hu, co-founder and chief operating officer of Kora, says.

Kora staff member with farmers. Photo courtesy of Kora

Plus, the types of groups that stand to gain the most by integrating blockchain into their daily lives are very often the existing sharing economy entities that were disadvantaged by traditional finance and market forces. “Everywhere we go, the co-op has become a centerpiece,” Hu says. “They’re a really powerful structure for raising economies of scale, locally. The blockchain is actually this really powerful tool that almost overlaps, word for word, with some of the academic research that’s been done on co-ops.”

Another player using blockchain in the financial inclusion space is Moeda, a cooperative crypto-credit banking platform. “Moeda provides a transparent impact investment platform to impact investors and a banking-as-a-service platform to entrepreneurs who will be receiving loans to not only fund, but to scale and grow their businesses,” Taynaah Reis, CEO of Moeda, told Shareable in 2017. “In turn, their local communities will directly benefit.” Moeda has provided a round of microloans and seed funding for businesses in Brazil, and has partnered with a network of agricultural cooperatives in Brazil called Unicafes to do so.

Not all that glitters is digital gold

But there are still quite a few reasons to be wary of using blockchains. Emin Gün Sirer is computer science professor at Cornell University and co-director of the Initiative For Cryptocurrencies & Contracts (IC3), a group of academics and researchers working on cryptocurrency and blockchain development. Sirer created a digital distributed currency, Karma, that predated Bitcoin and is also familiar with the sharing economy and its reluctance to embrace blockchain. “Deep down, the underlying ethos is different,” says Sirer, about the two worlds. “In one, you have these highly individualistic, highly profit-driven people and they want to make money. And in the other, you have the exact opposite type of people. They want to make the world a better place and they don’t care about personal monetary compensation, typically.” But, Sirer explains that many in the latter “have a bootstrapping problem, they find it difficult to raise money.”

“But at the intersection of these two worlds are fantastic ideas. If you can come up with something that is easy to bootstrap, that does have some incentives built in for the people operating the schemes, and also makes the world a better place — then we’re talking. And we’re beginning to see such projects.” Some, like Chelsea Rustrum, co-author of the book “It’s a Shareable Life” and a contributor to Shareable, are focused on reconciling these two worlds so that they can work together. Rustrum started a group called Blockchain for Good which runs regular meetups in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City and has also organized around diversifying this space, since women are severely underrepresented in the blockchain space, and minorities are still underrepresented in the tech industry.

Blockchain for Good meet up photo courtesy of Chelsea Rustrum

But other problems still exist. This ecosystem is still rapidly emerging. As such, applications and code are getting deployed as fast as possible by startups that feel acute pressure to move first — lest they allow competitors to swoop in, dominate a niche, and lock them out of the market. This rapid pace has made it particularly easy to lose funds due to hacks resulting from bugs in code and mistakes, in addition to scams and phishing attacks that prey on those new to the ecosystem.

Furthermore, the regulatory environment around assets issued and sold on a blockchain remains highly uncertain, and laws are playing out differently across countries and individual states. Decisions about whether certain types of blockchain assets are securities, commodities, money, or a new asset class are still being made and are changing over time. On top of that, a few Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) have been outright scams, and many others are nothing more than honest, but inadequate ideas presented in a whitepaper, along with a website and some team photos.

Blockchain for cities

Still, the idea of crowdfunding on the blockchain goes beyond ICOs. Cities are finding innovative ways to use the blockchain to raise and distribute funds for public projects. In the U.S., the city of Berkeley in California announced that it would be using blockchain as the backbone for municipal bonds, allowing for more flexible funding for small directed projects, along with increased transparency. Importantly, this model would allow the less-wealthy residents of cities to peer-fund small projects in their locality and receive a financial benefit from doing so. “Normally, because the bonds are so expensive — these fiduciary firms  looking to scale their profits,” says Ben Bartlett, Vice Mayor of Berkeley. “They disallow small projects. You have to pay $100 million [to issue a bond], and things like that. But this way you can issue a bond for something small like a firetruck.” And that’s exactly what Berkeley is planning on doing.

Photo of Berkeley City Council meeting by Scott Morris

Separately, the City of Austin recently announced that it plans on using blockchain technology to provide identity services to its homeless population, simplifying the process of offering services and benefits to a demographic that frequently runs into obstacles due to lack of identity.

This is where the concept of a self-sovereign identity comes in. Simply put, a self-sovereign identity on the blockchain is a permanent identity that can only be accessed in full by the person or entity to whom it belongs, yet portions of that identity can be shown to any individual, organization, or agency whenever it becomes relevant. Since self-sovereign identities are decentralized and encrypted, identity theft or incidents like last-year’s Equifax hack become much less of a problem.

The existence of self-sovereign identities could allow individuals and small organizations to verify information about each other without having to go through third parties, again facilitating peer-to-peer uses. For example, instead of waiting on a credit report for a rental application, a landlord would be able to verify an applicant’s rental payment history, after the applicant chooses to authorize the landlord to see that information. Furthermore, the existence of self-sovereign identities would allow startups, NGOs, and government agencies to provide services to beneficiaries  and vulnerable populations while granting agency and protections to recipients of those services.

Blockchain for education and aid

One organization moving toward implementing a self-sovereign identity indirectly by providing a different set of services first is Amply near Cape Town, South Africa. Similar to the way a person could fund a new fire truck in Berkeley, they might also fund an educational center facilitated by blockchain. In Durban, some early childhood development centers receive government subsidies based on how many children attend its programs, but to date, the recordkeeping for these centers have been done on hand, on paper. As a result, the quality of the data is quite low and reporting is cumbersome.

Amply’s smartphone app simplifies the process of recording student attendance, and the organization aims to increase the app’s versatility via blockchain in quite a few ways. “The longer term goal, also here is that each child and staff member gets a decentralized identity (a DID). That identity, we hope, will eventually build up to become a self-sovereign identity,” explains Joyce Zhang, project lead at Amply.

By using a blockchain to track specific outcomes, Amply and partner organization ixo will make it significantly easier and more transparent for the South African government, nonprofits, and individual donors to measure and track impact with high levels of precision. If widely adopted, this won’t just make it easier for entities to see where their funds have the greatest cost-to-impact ratios, but it will vastly simplify and enable the sharing of impact data and information about what works between organizations and across borders — all while protecting the sensitive information of vulnerable populations.

Photo courtesy of Amply

Potential donors can decide that “this is a really cool project, I want to donate $100,” says Zhang, who is also the program manager at ixo. “And then for those attendances, instead of the teachers getting it from the government, they can get it from private funders or whoever else is using this system.”

One of the main aspects of the blockchain is that when any type of information gets put onto it, it is unfeasible and nearly impossible to alter or delete that information at a later time. On a secure blockchain, a record is a record and it always will be.

Blockchain as a public good

This is particularly useful for certain purposes that have nothing to do with transactions or markets, such as sharing information in the face of censorship from powerful or moneyed adversaries. The journalism platform Civil is tapping into this potential to permanently secure information in the public domain. Once something is published on Civil (planned to launch later this year), the platform enables a permanent archive of the content to be logged in the Ethereum blockchain so that no one — hackers, new management, or unsympathetic government — can alter or delete that content for private gain.

This is not a theoretical threat. In 2016, the Hungarian newspaper Nepszabadsag (People’s Freedom) was abruptly shut down and all of its records were taken offline in retaliation for its criticism of Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Closer to home, the Trump administration has taken down the Environmental Protection Agency’s climate change webpages, though its archives are still available.

In fact, the founders of the Civil platform created this functionality in response to incidents faced by local websites recently. In a post Daniel Kinsley, engineering lead at Civil, wrote that, “In 2017 alone, DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of the leading, local news-focused publications in the U.S., were abruptly shut down by their billionaire owner. Eight years of archives were taken down in a single day, and were only restored after vociferous public protest.” Yet by storing or backing up journalistic on decentralized blockchains, inadvertent censorship of this sort, as well as purposeful censorship will be much less of an issue.

Today’s media makes it nearly impossible to be level-headed about the potential for blockchain. It has a few reputations, all of which are extreme: blockchain as a technological panacea; blockchain as the driver of an apocalyptic crypto-bubble fueled by speculators, scammers, and ponzi schemers; blockchain as a force of revolution that will overthrow governments and bring entrenched industry incumbents to their knees.

It’s possible that certain aspects of of all of these visions will be realized, but eventually much of the sound and fury will subside, outlived and overtaken by the use cases that actually serve people on a day-to day level. Originally conceived as a peer-to-peer technology, the brunt of blockchain’s potential still lies in its ability to serve as the technological underpinning for the sharing economy and facilitate financial inclusion, information sharing, and even democratic self-governance and local governance.

When we find ourselves in a world fully immersed in blockchain, we will find that it is a permanently transformed one — one where cooperatives, schools, and neighborhood groups have many of the same technological advantages as governments and multinational corporations. But it will also one be a world that we take for granted and just seems normal — as normal as today’s world of electric light, wireless internet, and satellites in space.

Header image of the Brooklyn Microgrid project courtesy of LO3

Curious to learn more about the projects mentioned in this piece? Read these Q&As for a deeper dive:

• A blockchain for farmers and co-ops: Q&A with Kora’s Maomao Hu​
• Blockchain and the potential for local P2P power: Q&A with LO3 Energy
• Civic crowdfunding with the blockchain: Q&A with Berkeley vice mayor Ben Bartlett
• Blockchain for education in South Africa: Q&A with Joyce Zhang from ixo and Amply
• Blockchain-powered journalism: Q&A with Matt Coolidge of Civil

Do you have any leads for stories about how other organizations are using blockchain for good? Contribute your ideas to Shareable’s Collaborative Storytelling Project. And sign up for our weekly newsletter to stay on top of upcoming events and reader engagement projects around this story and more.

The post Blockchain as a force for good: How this technology could transform the sharing economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Goteo Foundation (www.goteo.org), in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, launches the call “Conjuntament” A matchfunding pool of 96.000€ are available to multiply citizens donations made to the 24 social initiatives. Every € donated by the citizens will be duplicated by the Goteo Foundation.

The 24 social initiatives want to change Barcelona and its neighborhoods through a lot of projects which are economically sustainable and related to sectors as agro-ecology, feminism, technological sovereignty, cooperative housing, labor inclusion, documentary production, the commons, the economy of cares and the sharing & social economy.

Matchfunding is a new way to manage institutional budgets which provides:

• Legitimacy: Public institutions legitimize their budgets while allowing citizens to decide and prioritize how public money is used. Creating a space for participation where citizenship promotes and supports initiatives coming from below.
• Participation: Citizens decide to launch projects and to choose which projects to support.
• Sustainability: Projects come from neighborhoods and organized citizenship, in opposition to top-down policies. Communities are behind these projects and they want to make them alive.
• Transparency: Citizens audit the whole process, as they can check and visualize instantly how the money is used.
• Success: The success rate rises until more than 90%, when a public institution multiplicate the donations made to the crowdfunding campaigns.
• Learning lab: While they are in campaign, projects learn as they work collectively, making the project stronger and growing their network.

Key points

• The call for projects was open from October 23th to December 4th 2017.
• 24 projects have been selected and ranked according to the criteria gathered into the Terms (https://ca.goteo.org/call/conjuntament) and according to two categories: 1. social entrepreneurship and 2. Common and collaborative economies.
• Past 8th of February a communication workshop for the 24 selected projects was held.
• Advising has been carried out with the promoters in order to help them to prepare their crowdfunding campaigns. This will continue during the campaign and post-campaign.

What is the impact of the matchfunding call Conjuntament?

67 projects have been submitted, where 24 of these were selected.

These projects need a total of € 192,543 as a minimum budget of crowdfunding and € 321,419 as a optimal.

The Goteo Foundation, in collaboration with the Barcelona City Council and Barcelona Activa, created a matchfunding pool of € 94,000 available for the projects (€ 4,000 per project) to meet their budgets.

About Goteo

Goteo is a civic crowdfunding platform for initiatives with a high social impact on cultural, technological and educational projects. Through this social and commons approach, Goteo designes tools, such as matchfunding, which allows public and private institutions supporting and promoting social projects by multiplying the amount of donations they receive from citizens.

Goteo is also a community of communities made up of more than 120,000 people, with a success rate of more than 75%.

However, it is much more than that. Behind the platform there is a non-profit foundation (with the consequent fiscal advantages for donors in Spain) and a multidisciplinary team developing tools and services for co-creation and collective financing.

With a common mission always linked to the principles of transparency, progress and improvement of society. Its philosophy of open source and free licenses resulted in copies and alliances in several countries, as well as is has been recognized and awarded internationally since 2011.

For further information and/or collaborations, please contact at [email protected]

Photo by raindog

The post Matchfunding Social Entrepreneurship and the Commons Collaborative Economy in Barcelona appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Since 2015 Outlandish have spent £192,450 in Cobudget across 34 buckets.

Kate Beecroft interviews Brian Spurding, from the web services coop Outlandish about their use of Cobudget. Originally published in Greater than/finance. 

A web services consultancy based in London, Outlandish is a worker owned cooperative.

They use Cobudget to democratically distribute dividends to all cooperative members as a way to invest in new projects they care about, for example new tech products, social impact projects that need software, match funding of international initiatives.

We talked to Outlander Brian Spurling about how they have been using Cobudget.

How does Cobudgeting work at Outlandish?

At Outlandish the Cobudget process works like this: every quarter, the surplus is distributed proportionally according to the hours that people have spent working for Outlandish. This money goes to everyone’s Cobudget accounts. From there, these funds can be allocated to different ‘buckets’ — buckets are projects that people from Outlandish have proposed.

Anyone who is either a member of the cooperative or close collaborator — called ‘Outlanders‘ — can create proposals for projects to be funded.

Mandatory information for these proposals is the description of the project goals, as well as the people who will be working on the project and the estimated time and money needed for the work. The projects should all in some way or another serve Outlandish’s mission and theyshould not be core expenses or costs of the business.

What have been some of your most funded projects?

Featured amongst the funded projects have been a prototype for the site schoolcuts.org.uk. This site features an interactive infographic to show how your local schools are being de-funded. It turned from a successful Cobudget project into a commercial project in cooperation with the National Union of Teachers and won silver at the digital impact awards 2017.

Another big investment by Outlandish has been Daugher of Social Monitor, a project to develop an existing system into a product offering. With no sales opportunities in the pipeline, this is a great example of how Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.

“Cobudget enables and encourages us to spend our surplus on long-term investment.” — Brian Spurling

One of our favourite clients (a research organisation fighting corruption in Papua New Guinea) brought us a great project idea. We identified some additional tech we could build — stuff that would be good for them and interesting for us — so we match-funded their budget (£32, 250). This was a huge success.

Screenshot of one of the projects Outlandish funded on Cobudget

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What has changed since you started using Cobudget to spend your surplus?

Before Cobudget, it was easy to spend small amounts of surplus (<£5,000), because an individual member could sign this off themselves. But it was hard to do anything bigger than that because there was no defined framework on how to make those decisions.

“The way Outlandish makes decisions about our surplus has changed dramatically. Pre-Cobudget, there was a lack of transparency and the authority to spend the surplus was limited to the co-ops members.” — Brian Spurling

This could have been defined without using Cobudget, of course. But with Cobudget, not only is the spending of the surplus now transparent, but anybody working at Outlandish can propose projects, and funds can be distributed directly to individuals. It is the combination of these three elements that make it so transformative for how we manage our surplus.

Thanks for reading!

If you would like to learn more about the tool Cobudget, read more here.

For further resources and use cases, check out our Guide to Collaborative Finance.

The post Investing surplus for impact: Cobudgeting at Outlandish appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Deals between companies and governments working together to automate acceptable content online are too common. Whilst content filtering is being proposed in EU copyright law, in other situations it’s all wrapped up in a closed door agreement. 

Ruth Coustick-Deal, writing for OpenMedia.org lays out the “shadow regulation” complementing the dubious legal propositions which are being drafted to curtail sharing.

Ruth Coustick-Deal: As the excitement over using automation and algorithms in tech to “disrupt” daily life grows, so too does governments’ desire to use it to solve social problems. They hope “automation” will disrupt piracy, online harassment, and even terrorism.

This is particularly true in the case of deploying automated bots for content moderation on the web. These autonomous programs are designed to detect certain categories of posts, and then take-down or block them without any human intervention.

In the last few weeks:

1)The UK Government have announced they have developed an algorithmic tool to remove ISIS presence from the web.
2) Copyright industries have called for similar programs to be installed that can remove un-approved creative content in the United States.
3) The European Commission has suggested that filters can be used to “proactively detect, identify, and remove” anything illegal – from comments sections on news sites to Facebook posts.
4) The Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, currently being debated by MEPs, is proposing using technical filters to block copyrighted content from being posted.

There’s a recklessness to all of these proposals – because so much of them involve sidestepping legal processes.

EFF coined the term “shadow regulation” for rules that are made outside of the legislative process, and that’s what is happening here. A cosy relationship between business and governments has developed that the public are being left outside of when it comes to limiting online speech.

Let’s take a look at Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s anti-terrorist propaganda tool. She claims it can identify “94% of IS propaganda with 99.995% accuracy.” Backed up by this amazingly bold claim, the UK Government want to make the tool available to be installed on countless platforms across the web (including major platforms like Vimeo and YouTube) which would be able to detect, and then remove such content. However, it’s likely to be in some form of unofficial “agreement”, rather than legislation that is scrutinised by parliament.

Similarly, in the European Commission’s communication on automating blocking illegal content, our friends at EDRi point out, “the draft reminds readers – twice – that the providers have “contractual freedom”, meaning that… safeguards will be purely optional.”

If these programs are installed without the necessary public debate, a legal framework, or political consensus – then who will they be accountable to? Who is going to be held responsible for censorship of the wrong content? Will it be the algorithm makers? Or the platforms that utilise them? How will people object to the changes?

Even when these ideas have been introduced through legal mechanisms they still give considerable powers to the platforms themselves. For example, the proposed copyright law we have been campaigning on through Save the Link prevents content from being posted that was simply identified by the media industry – not what is illegal.

The European Commission has suggested using police to tell the companies when a post, image, or video is illegal. There is no consideration of using courts – who elsewhere are the ones who make calls about justice. Instead we are installing systems that bypass the rule of law, with only vague gestures towards due process.

Governments are essentially ignoring their human rights obligations by putting private companies in charge. Whether via vague laws or back-room agreements, automated filtering is putting huge amounts of power in the hands of a few companies, who are getting to decide what restrictions are appropriate.

The truth is, the biggest platforms on the web already have unprecedented control over what gets published online. These platforms have become public spaces, where we go to communicate with one another. With these algorithms however, there is an insidious element of control that the owners of the platforms have over us. We should be trying to reduce the global power of these companies, rather than hand over the latest tools for automated censorship to use freely.

It’s not just the handing over of power that is problematic. Once something has been identified by police or by the online platform as “illegal,” governments argue that it should never be seen again.  What if that “illegal” content is being shown for criticism or news-worthy commentary? Should a witness to terrorism be censored for showing the situation to the world? Filters make mistakes. They cannot become our gods.

Content moderation is one of the trickiest subjects being debated by digital rights experts and academics at the moment. There have been many articles written, many conferences on the subject, and dozens of papers that have tried to consider how we can deal with the volumes of content on the web – and the horrific examples that surfact.

It is without a doubt that however content moderation happens online, there must be transparency. It must be specified in law what exactly gets blocked. And the right to free expression must be considered.

The post The dangerous trend for automating censorship, and circumventing laws appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In ten years, old political systems will be gone. All around Europe we are seeing a wave of change of communities and citizens coming together to take power back from politicians. Citizens are mobilising all around the world proving that the people can and should play a much bigger role in our democratic societies.

The city of Brussels is facing great democratic, ecological and socio-economic challenges. We, residents of Brussels, believe a citizens’ movement is the most effective way to restore hope, reinforce equality and empower citizens, in all their diversity, to decide what is best to improve their city and their lives. The citizen Spring is finding its way into Brussels, accelerating the transition to a new paradigm where active citizenship becomes real power.

Many citizens already work to shape the city and find solutions to everyday problems. But many — too many — organizations feel a glass ceiling when it comes to scaling up their initiative to do more and do better. This glass ceiling, in our perspective, has two main root causes: the first is the lack of political will to support experimental initiatives which transfer power to citizens; the second is the socio-economic system that makes collaboration as well as circular local economies the exception instead of the norm.

In order to change this, we are calling for a free-citizens’ gathering so that, together, we may organise the city and bring together groups of people representing the diversity that makes Brussels unique. Collectively, citizens of all origins and backgrounds are the only force capable of adapting the city and establishing the priorities which meet the needs and aspirations of its inhabitants.

We believe in people, in you, in us — together.

What we propose is to create a new way of exercising politics. We want to use collective intelligence to design creative alternatives and bring about effective solutions. We will start from a blank sheet where you and all those around the table will have the opportunity to express concerns, propose approaches and develop solutions. We believe the time has come to push for alternative ways to do policy-making, including:

• TRANSPARENCY, RESPONSIBILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY : Citizens want real transparency on all decisions, the guarantee that their needs are being addressed and that their ideas can influence decisions.
• MORE THAN VOTING : Citizens can do more than voting. They can jointly identify priorities, co-create policy and allocate budgets.
• COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE : Collective intelligence techniques should be at the root of decision-making. Internal processes of participation need to go beyond the opinions of individuals. Deliberation sessions between citizens of different walks of life lead to creative solutions that are far better adjusted both to reality and to the needs of stakeholders.
• ACTION : the movement needs agility and experimentation, embracing bold approaches piloting possible solutions and improving them continuously.

Few things are as powerful as an idea whose time has come. If you feel energized by these ideas, we would love to create it with you.

This is the first ‘mood check’ to scout the energy to ignite this Movement and take back Brussels in the 2018 communal elections … otherwise, we will have to wait for another 6 years.

The citizen spring is here and the time is now!

We, citizens from Brussels

See also, for ideas and a sense of possible:

• Barcelona en Común and taking back control
• When a movement becomes a party — the example of Barcelona
• Win the City Guide
• Ministry of Ideas — A new way in Iceland

“This is not a traditional (movement) that thinks it can run things better on behalf of the people. This is a movement that believes the people can run things better on their own behalf, combining citizen wisdom with expert knowledge to solve the everyday problems that people face.”

Stacco Troncoso, P2P Foundation

Image: Brussels — Luc Schuiten

The post Citizen from Brussels, how to give your voice real power? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following are a series of assertions around our present geo-political circumstances and hypotheses about our most effective actions.

• There is a global institutional order, largely initiated as the aftermath of WWII and growing organically through to the fall of the Eastern Bloc, at which point it substantially accelerated. This order includes both active and passive interconnections that span economic, technological, social, cultural, political and military dimensions. By “institutional order” is meant the organizational and conceptual mechanisms by which human activities are focused and directed. This includes governmental organizations (the US Military, the EU ministry of agriculture, medicare), meta governmental organizations (the UN, the WTO, the IMF), NGOs, corporations, etc.
• This global institutional order was largely formulated based on the technical and conceptual state of the art existing after WWII. Although it has consistently been complexified and updated (“patched”) in the intervening 60 years, it is still fundamentally organized around hows, whats and whys that originate in that era.
• The foundation on which this order was built and by which it made sense has been undergoing profound transformation — particularly in the past two decades. Largely, this is the result of the unprecedented *success* of the present order: advances in information technology, increases in population, depletion of global natural resources, etc.
• Whenever an institutional order is faced with this kind of transformation of its fundament, it can choose two paths:

1. Deconstruct and reorganize functions around emerging capabilities
2. Attempt to conserve the existing order

The former choice involves significant pain. Disrupting existing means (and even ends) is contra human psychological tendencies. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to be successful — many things can happen when long-bound energies are released in an institutional reconstruction. As a consequence, it requires tremendous foresight and political will.

The latter choice ultimately involves the death of the society. An attempt to conserve an order that has become obsolete requires an intensification of “delusional” mechanisms that distance society from reality and eventually deplete its ability to operate. Thus society moves from productive to conservative to moribund. Depending on the political will and political power of the institutions driving the transition from productive to conservative, this death can be very quick and destructive (see French Revolution) or can potentially be delayed for a very long time (“zombieification”). Indeed, the period just following the transition from productive to conservative (open to closed) can be experienced as highly positive (a “golden age”). However, once a society moves to full closure — like any entropic environment — its fate is (largely, although never absolutely) sealed.

• The decision to deconstruct and reorganize can rarely (never?) be made by existing institutions (the past), it must, instead, be made by “institutions from the future” — which can provide solutions and vision that is simply outside of the means of existing institutions.
• It is possible to interpolate the shape of future institutional orders based on the present circumstances.
• Uniquely in history, our future institutional order must be self-assembling, self-organizing and meta-stable. There can be no central organizing structure that is adequate to their construction — instead they must be architected to “unfold” dynamically yet effectively.
• Nonetheless, we can assert several rules that are quite likely to be part of their basic operations:

– Data aware: in principle all possible transactions are stored and searchable

– Transparent: in principle all transactions can be viewed by all participants

– Distributed: in principle no levels of hierarchy

– Anti-fragile: designed to maximize and benefit from “black swan” events rather than minimize and suffer from them

– Auto-liberating: intrinsically difficult to capture and all efforts to capture are rendered ruinous

– Transient. Beyond the basic resilient holon and stored data, every function or organization is built with the time or conditions that warrant its death built into the design/plan.

The new system must run concurrently with the old in order to avoid inducing general collapse. To achieve this end:

1. It displaces due to choice and not force. Bit by bit and not all at once.
2. It can leverage mature services of the old system to gain capabilities rapidly and supplement deficits.
3. It must be able to defend itself against predation by the old system.
4. It replaces old system functions when able.
5. Connection to the new system is a function of desire/membership and a willingness to live by a set of rules, both at the individual level and at the level of the resilient community. Membership is not based on geography or accident of birth, it is earned through behavior.

Photo by giloudim

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Harvie points to the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Risks report, which states that “global risks remain beyond the domain of just one actor” and that to create a healthy planet and people we must focus on collaborative and multi-stakeholder action. He also calls for a decentralization of our food systems using ecological principles and local knowledge and input.

Recognizing that clinical care determines only about 10% of health outcomes, Harvie explains that it’s essential to shift our health system to one that sees health as an interconnection of emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical well-being driven by social, economic and environmental factors.

As our current healthcare system is profit driven and externalizes social and environmental costs “in a manner that is inconsistent with health,” our next health system needs to “untangle deeply enmeshed financial incentives within the business of healthcare, so as unlock the true health potential within us all” and create a healthcare approach that recognizes the body as a complex, interrelated system.

To address the immense challenge of creating the next health system, Harvie turns to complexity science which provides the following insights into how a systems worldview changes our perception:

• From parts to the whole
• From objects to relationships
• From knowledge to contextual knowledge
• From quantity to quality
• From structure to process
• From contents to patterns

To create new systems of collaboration, empowerment, self-organization, transparency and more, he looks to the principles of the commons, where communities work together to “craft, monitor, enforce, and revise rules to limit their behavior and keep their resources available for the long term.” Harvie explains: “At their core is an acknowledgement of the importance of an approach that has a fair set of rules, a means to represent a voice, transparency, self-determination, localized boundaries or a sense of place, inclusivity and the right to health and well-being.”

Creating the next health system is a big task that will not happen overnight. The importance of rethinking the health of the planet and its inhabitants requires long-term commitment, collaboration and a new perspective. As Harvie writes:

“As we move forward, we must keep in mind that these issues are complex and require ongoing experimentation to test and probe the potential of nascent models and approaches. This uncertainty is challenging for our culture, which is accustomed to long term planning and the belief in predictability, especially in the context of impending climate change impacts. Moreover, we are accustomed to working within silos of expertise and have undeveloped interpersonal tools to work in this new networked, relational space. We must incorporate commons principles and subsidiarity in the context of a strong national and global rights framework.”

 
Cross-posted from Shareable.

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