Platforms as commons

Workspaces LOTE6 “OpenVillage Festival”
, , , ,
1

I would like to propose a discussion panel for the OpenVillage Festival 2017.

During the last six months, I have been attending almost all the event on Platform Cooperativism in Europe.

Even tough is exciting what is happening, there isn’t a model that reached a dimension that can be compared to any dominant platform, and some points are missing from the global discussion.

Platform Cooperativism promotes shared ownership among users of the platform in order to create non-extractive alternatives to current platforms.

The digital economy produces enormous amounts of wealth that become profit (often non-taxed) for few billionaires. This money could be used to power the welfare state, nonprofit projects or a collaborative economy.

In the last 5/10 years, our economy has been “platformed.”

The “disruption” didn’t allow proper reflection and to take action to create the most desirable platforms for users.

We have enough data on the externalities of this platforms and the extent of the impact on our economies, it’s now possible to analyze what brought us here, the opportunity that we should investigate and the challenges that we need to face.

Being part of the Fairbnb project helped me to focus on important questions related to the digital economy.

How can we create non-extractive alternatives platforms that can compete with the existing one?

Is it possible to create platforms that are “commons”?

Can we use the wealth unlocked by this technology to fund non-profit community projects?

How can an organization be both efficient and competitive without losing in inclusiveness and openness?

To answer this questions, there are many guests that it would be useful to invite:

Internet of ownership: The Internet of Ownership is a resource for the emerging online democratic economy. Its purpose is to advance platform cooperativism—a vision for online platforms that share democratic ownership and governance among the people who rely on them, especially those who contribute their labor and personal data.

Guest: Nathan Schneider

Fairmondo: Fairmondo wants to create a scalable fair ecommerce platform and is one of the pioneering platform cooperatives with an innovative redistribution scheme that honors unpaid contributions.

Guest: Felix Weth

Ecosia: Is a search engine that plants trees with the value that you generate through your digital actions

Guest: Christian Kroll

Faircoop: Fair.coop is an open global cooperative, self-organized via the Internet and remaining outside nation-state control. Its aim is to make the transition to a new world by reducing the economic and social inequalities among human beings as much as possible, and at the same time gradually contribute to a new global wealth, accessible to all humankind as commons.

Guest: Enric Duran

Platform Design Toolkit: Is a set of open-source tools to design digital and non-digital platforms with ease.

Guest: Simone Cicero

Other Guests: Sangeet Paul Choudary is a platform strategist, probably one of the most skilled person on this planet in understanding platform

Of course, other founders of Fairbnb could join the discussion and hopefully we could launch the platform during the event.

With this broad variety of guests, we will have enough competencies to generate a debate that could be fascinating and could help to further the global discussion on those important thematics.

1 Like
2

Interesting and highly relevant

Hi Damiano, and welcome :slight_smile:

I’ve been following this discussion with interest. @peteratomic knows ALOT about the practicalities involved as he is building a cooperatively owned music streaming platform. In my mind there is a kind of matrix: Kind of asset being traded (material, immaterial) on the one hand, vs timeframe (the initiation, getting it up and running, and long term stewardship). A major outcome from one of our previous events is the idea of market failures in the sharing economy. I know @rmchase has done a lot of thinking about this topic, much of it informed by her experiences in building e.g Zipcar…

3

Hello @Nadia, thanks! Is a real pleasure to e-meet you.

I think this is one of the most urgent topics that needs to be discussed and it’s where our actions can make a real difference.

@peteratomic hello! I met someone from Resonate at OPEN2017, it was you?

In this comment https://edgeryders.eu/en/comment/27263#comment-27263 , I highlight a strategy for the activation of the platform.

Basically, for and Airbnb-like platform is good to use this system because you don’t have to maximize the benefit of the peer producers (as it should be for Uber for example). You can maximize the benefit for the society (for this reason fairbnb should be a common, not owned just by certain users e.g. hosts).

There are many reasons why Airbnb fit and on why it should be the platform to target in order to attempt to change the digital economy.

I have been thinking and studying a lot and I would love to write about it. I made some months ago the structure for a green paper call “Overthrowing Power, one Platform at a Time” Green paper structure - Google Docs .

if someone is interested in developing this, it would be a pleasure to do it .

Here there are some articles, that I found interesting, on platforms (related to the technical part and on growth hacking/critical mass in particular) Articles plat - WorkFlowy

We also did an Horizon2020 call (we didn’t win) but is a huge work and I can share it if you want.

2 Likes
4

About care?

Hello @Damiano , indeed this is a very important topic.

Do you have in mind any examples close to health and social care? I can’t think of anything right now, but it must be my own fault. Is there the “Uber of health care” out there? There must be. And conversely a platform cooperativist alternative to it?

1 Like
5

Future of healthcare and SV giants

Hello Albero,

I think that opencare was meant as a broader topic, indeed for me, inequality is strongly related to health.

The wealth that gets drained, without taxation, by platforms could/should be used to power many initiatives that are related to social care.

Also, the same giants that are in control of the dominating platforms are the one that we should fear more in the healthcare industry.

Calico, a company that will tackle aging, is owned by Google. In general, the Silicon Valleys’ company are investing a lot in Biotechnology and Healthcare, and this is because they know that they can dominate this sector.

We are in the Omics Era Omics era | PPT, data are crucial and will lead in the coming 10/20 years to have personal medicine and gene therapy that could lead to an unprecedented extension of human lifespan.

Big tech companies are the ones that know better how to harness information from data, that’s why they know that they are going to compete with hospitals and with nationals public health sectors.

In general, I think it’s important to analyze problem in a non-reductive way and that we should learn as much as possible on platforms’ topics and counteract where we still can,

but it could be a good idea to have also focused on health related platforms and companies (e.g. 23&me that do private analysis on DNA etc.)

6

Common creations & relating

Hey @damiano,

I like your questions and experiences with fairbnb. I’ve also been thinking about this topic and share some ideas and perspectives on http://creatingnewrealities.co/creating-new-realities/.

My perspective is that there seem to be natural relationships to property and things, even if they are temporal. So I’d like to introduce this element of relationship into the equation for commons. I’m also interested in exploring this topic further and create a software/ community/ commoncreation tool to support the natural relation to our creations and possesions.

Another aspect that relates to this is the topic of access of ownership. Which is another way of relating. I’d like to experiment with this in the forms of networks and platforms. Curious how you feel!

7

Creating new realities

nice project!

For what I see there are so many valuable initiatives around the world, the main issue is that there’s lack of funding for them and the general overload of informations makes it very difficult to understand what is important and what is not.

If we want to reach a profound change in this society we should aim to create new innovative form of credits that promote pluralities and radical new ideas while giving enough security to people that trace alternative paths.

Sharing economy platforms could be used to power these activities because they unlocked a large number of resources that could be redirected towards projects thanks to a crowdaction.

P.s.

I will probably live for some weeks in the netherlands this summer, let me know if you want to meet!

1 Like
8

Moving forward with a panel on fair platforms for cooperation?

Hi @Damiano so you should’ve received a confirmation for OpenVillage attendance at this point. Are you up for discussing your panel more concretely? Someone in Brussels whom you could consider inviting is @Timebank.cc_BXL .

We are lining up community and guest curators to work on each session and make sure it makes it into the draft program we are about to launch. The weekly Wednesday calls are dedicated to work on the sessions. We meet at 18:00 CET tomorrow. Are you guys up for it? @Damiano  , @ewoudvenema and others.

This is the link to the hangout, see you?

1 Like
9

Hangout

Sorry I missed the email!

Yes, I will gladly connect tomorrow for the hangout :slight_smile:

1 Like