Checking in here concerning the Summit Program
Concerning:
I will dive a bit more in some of the topics within this discussion frame:
Types of mindsets to overcome the crisis within the craft food industrie: “le capital sympathie”, minimizing losses, business as usual, going social
Personal approach: breaking apart each piece of the business, cutting back & not wanting to restart the machine.
Personal approach
Context: starting food business that is taking off, envy of growth, rolling out new opportunities & “professionalization” of the whole enterprise. Loss of 95% of the revenue once the covid crisis goes full throttle.
Now: looking into a much more artistic / social organization structure of the project. I don’t want to put food and business in the same basket anymore. Food projects should be possible within a social approach. So i’m cutting of most of my growth potential, selecting just a few gigs to be able to pay the costs. Cutting back on the loop: more demand → more investments → more costs → needing more clients → more demands…
P.S: i will continue to edit this post, don’t know how to make a draft
Hi Asli, I think it’s a good idea to start from how you conceptualize ‘precarity of knowledge workers’ - I am curious if all higher education falls into that category, or you have zoomed in on specific types of teachers.
Before our scheduled call later today, I would invite you to look at this conversation we had with @seh_notts who is supporting teachers to adopt digital formats for their work at the University in Nothingham, but who also spoke of the difficulties in eLearning for both teachers and students. In that conversation and others on culture, it became clear that everyone is in a crisis, but arts and humanities are in an even more precarious situation. Do you have any distinctions betweek fields or types of workers?
I have created a wiki stub session for you and also added what we have so far - the summary will need to be changed, but you can expand there with all the details coming in.
Can you keep the points which you think the discussion should go into? Those not so important add them in the comments, or discard?
That will help us when we invite new people.
A good date for this event for me is the last week of May, how about for you?
After taking some time, reflecting on how to enhance the results of OCI Lab edition one. And observing the outcomes of initiatives that have been taken to fight against the COVID 19 crisis. What is OCI Lab ?
OCI Lab is an online incubator program supporting social entrepreneurs through a combination of online Labs, Webinars, peer to peer learning sessions and One on one mentoring session.
We aim to improve the OCI Lab’s current process ( participants selection, matchmaking project leaders, and contributors).
During the last phase of OCI Lab edition 1, we had conducted a partnership study to develop our activities and build the basis of strong partnerships, mainly in Tunisia.
We will share with you shortly the approach we followed so that we can replicate the study to establish meaningful partnerships outside Tunisia.
We ( OCI LAB TEAM) will share with you shortly the next steps.
We are currently working on the process analysis and improvement of the first edition and on developing the activities of the second edition simultaneously.
No, sorry - an example of a profitable business that uses open source but doesn’t rip it off. Was in support of your comment. Profitable businesses that emerge from common effort that does not exploit or rip off that effort can be hard to find. It has been the case for decades that someone would build some nice add-on to an OS, often unpatented, and before they could turn it into a business, MS or Apple would incorporate it into their OS and the creator was SOL.
Have not yet done a proper post about it, but am planning to do so soon.
We discussed that during the last open source calls.
I think we can set up a good discussion around this and generate interest with it.
Do you think we could maybe even try to invite Graeber? Seems to fit the scifi eco vibe. And the bullshit work issue seems to fit the livelihoods.
will start a post about that 1. paid duck taping vs unpaid creating and 2. about the technical the issue of how to get paid on the internet soon as a stater point for that summit conversation. (@erik_lonroth is very passionate about that topic )
A community created business might be Craigslist. In the early days there was an asynchronous forum that Craig himself tended, and pretty obsessively too, that included feedback about how to improve the service. I suppose Craig could have cooked up some sort of scheme to kick back some money to the community, but everyone always seemed to feel that the service itself carried enough benefit just by the way it was designed and operated.
By offering every classified as free except for companies offering jobs and real estate sales, the service was architected to send value from business back to the community. It was, and is, maybe along with eBay, the ultimate killer app. The massive news industry stood by helpless and watched revenue flow from them over to Craig, even while he was giving away that which the paper charged high dollars for. Advertising a yard sale was not a trivial expense. And then it was no expense at all. No competing with that.
Also, most people don’t know that Craigslist actually started as an email list to his friends of events in SF that he thought were of interest. He was a programmer but also had a range of cultural interest and a love of nature. After the email list got too big he switched it to a very early and simple web page, which he then built into greater sophistication. Now it grosses a billion dollars a year. He was one of those people who could build and maintain his own prototype until such time as he could hire others to help him. Amazon was the same that way and so was eBay.
We talked about this @MariaEuler and immediately brings us in to the extremely hot topic on ‘how to do payment’ in a global internet market.
Its not just about the ‘business idea’, it’s not even about the ‘business model’ but also the very practical element of ‘how to transfer value’ from one wallet to another.
How strong the will to actually act on this apparently popular desire for real change is something that remains to be seen. I hope it isn’t like the loud support for Bernie Sanders from younger voters who then did not show up at the polls in big numbers because the pull back toward the existing hierarchies post-pandemic will be very powerful. It’s already happening in the USA where federal financial support has already gone to the cronies first leaving the smaller businesses and families behind. Hopefully Europe is not that corrupt.
Hello John, nice to (e) meet you. Don’t want to sound naive, but the scope for change could be bigger than 10 years ago? Just came out of a seminar with young professionals from Greece, a quarter said having been laid off since the start of the corona-crisis… And this time, concrete impacts are felt not in a handful of countries, but across the EU.
Europe will not follow the US’s example I hope, but still, there is a lack of scrutiny of decision-making, and the incentives of policymakers are not always aligned with the general interest. The coming year we’ll see some huge decisions (new EU budget, 1.5 trillion recovery fund, legislation AI + online platforms), people should really be on top of this. I understand civil society is often not aware of the timelines and consultation opportunities on EU policy files, I’m exploring now how this can be improved (there is the European Commission’s better regulation website, but apparently too complicated a tool).
We’ll keep the conversation through the draft session thread.