Platform Coop Conference 2017 — Notes

Here are the notes I took over the past weekend, oldest first.

• bold = things I should look into
• italic = my own thoughts (mostly, but some of my own thoughts are not)

Comments welcome.

Presentor

• presenter: grateful
• lawrence summers interview
• we should focus on disruptive power -> center the people
• dazzlecon
• Anspiral network -> build tool for choosing things

Unions?

Coworker.org

How to get power?

Starbucks/etc

• publicity
• worker version
• data

carina: home care workers

dark tech

Traditional jobs disappear, bad actors

worker

Problems:
* inconsistent schedule
* her well being linked to well being of person she was caring for
* union won battles, but workers still didn’t have consistent employment

Connects workers with employers

-> find local work for workers and that matches you

Client verification -> high road jobs

• security
• wages
• benefits
• choice

-> let workers be less dependent on just the employer

How are they different?

• raise both sides of the marketplace, not just consumers
• serving

Questions?

Turn into user co-op?

How can we share technology?

Next tech? — infrastructure

• Monopoly of tech companies?
• Big data / ai contracts?
• ISP’s get more power to do what they want
• what about older models of co-op electric companies?
• i.e. municipal broadband -> fastest, safest, cheapest

radicalization of utopian dreams — Danah boyd

Are all jobs being lost to tech? Tech loses women centered jobs and immigrant jobs.

We lose what it means to do work?

Destabilized identities -> lead to opiates, religion, activism

Young people turn to tech -> to create and use

Meme a president into being -> white supremacy, having fun

People who built tech -> John Perry Barlow

• different world with different values
• wanted to resist capitalism
• populism is the way to do this
• werent’t prepared to control the world

Birthed from idealism -> corrupted by money and what people did with it.

Silicon Valley built by freaks, geeks, queers. Wanted to escape masculinity of Wall Street. Becomes corrosive mysogony.

10 years ago, radical leftists thought that connectionists could lead to liberal power.

Anti leftists are willing to share tactics of leftists with other goals. Leftists can’t understand this. Our values today are the same as early tech developers. Their idealism was corrupted. Imagine ways in which your idealism can be corrupted.

Think about new ways of building up systems.

Danny — #BuyTwitter

Who is a part of this?

• leftist
• nationalists
• stock traders
• trolls

Why?
* accountability

Meeting point of very diverse groups

BLM — Oakland

Blocks train. People turn to twitter

#blacklivesmatter -> gives utility to twitter, Also public utility. It has very low stock price.

If Silicon Valley is so good at disrupting industries, why not company ownership?

How to mobilize shareholders to get on board with this.

co-op twitter?

History?

• AP forced to become co-op?

What about increasing user’s trust?

New-tech for new financing

Camille Kerr

How do we get the $? How does this relate to long term governance structures?

cooperatives for a better world

help workers, are more efficient

People don’t know what co-ops are… but they are more likely to buy from one.

1/3 people in US are members of some cooperative.

Youtube video

Money?

Reed switchboard?

hay Net USDA

How can communities meet each others needs?

Partnered with farmers, ex-cons, universities

Socap conference

Harken

Public’s interest in journalism

Sex and startups: Feminist business school/ feminine economy.

Only 15% of unicorn companies tackle real world problems.

WE should be funding things that help function democaracy

zebras fix what unicorns breaks: we need to repair social systems instead of disrupting!

zebras unite. Why is it hard to do this? It’s a lot more about process, then about technology. Tech is secondary.

the law now organization

Where do we get money for platforms co-ops?

A lot of this money is from public sources. See how state treasury funds are being allocated? See where this goes.

How we invest our money should mirror our beliefs.

Follow the money that is rightfully ours. Follow the painfully slow process of changing public policy

Employment vs work?

Division into tasks and micro tasks. Break this up.

Employees miss labor benefit, unprotected by government

What to do?

• update labor frameworks
• or update inside organization s themselves (our approach)

What did they do? -> MUTUALISM -> put together benefits.

Pooling income? Within system.

SMartBe -> pool power within gig economy. Need to be able to scale trust.

Can refugees ave platforms?

ReDI school in Berlin -> refugee training for digital skills

Refugees struggling to meet their basic needs.

Can platforms help?

Don’t want exploitative platforms. Not an economic unit, a whole network of people.

Platform coops can help -> add social dimension.

LAMA — platform coops in Europe

Sharing economy?
In theory, could be good. In practice, it sux!

Platform co-ops to the rescue.

How can co-op movement transform this? How can they transform co=ops

Can change idea of what collaborating means.

• p2p exchange, social networking
• Can open up co-ops to broader communities (instead of just homogenous groups)
• Need new tool for democracy online
• new sectors (freelancers)

Advantages of co=ops

• use existing communities
• be more sustainable
• connect local and global economy

Key challenges:

• hard to change existing co-ops
• not sexy
• can’t just copy existing model, need to think from ground up

Need to figure out what works on this.

Alex Wood — platform coops for freelancers

Remote gig economy? -> digital labor?

Early coops in 19th century, about working class. Lanark spinning co Scotland

Are platforms coops the future? NO: here its academics trying to create utopian society. Not enough PoC and low income. Might come from somewhere else unexpected.

People like them, because they feel exploited by existing systems.

However, might just suck anyway. Cause market is so bad. Doesn’t matter if coops run, because philopenes are so cheap etc. Globally competitive.

Trust issues online, different cultures, no human interaction.

Hard to transition from big platforms, because of already existing trust in it.

Appeals need to be rooted in people’s lived experiences of work

NCBA

100 year old organization. Umbrella for co-ops in US.

Lobbying work.

Federal policy guides co-ops coming to birth.

Thoughts after lunch

How are co-ops and democracies related? Can the democratic process be shifted to deal with the immediate needs of those involved? What models help data be used for those in the organizations.

For me: how can I stop evaluating people on how smart I think they are as how much they can contribute.

Yellow diamond on socks, interlocking with light green and blue diamonds. Pants rolled up, ❤️ on the badge. Holes in shoes.

Trees outside are red and green,
Rise and fallen the wind. Sag, swept with vigor by the wind.

I have been thinking about my life in terms of how I can support myself. What job do I need in order to be happy, have room for other things, learn, do what I want to.

Is my life not relational? Are those not the things which I depend on?

Can we leverage existing relational data to materialize communities?

It’s not about entities (people, places, things), but processes (doing something together, working, eating, moving) and their relations.

Art of War — use existing system as much as possible, don’t tear it down.

Sociacracy — Decision making based on consent not consensus.

Farming data in western mass?

City gov’t NYC R&D

They are thinking about how to build 21st century forum.

State level then city level

Advantages of working in non-tech -> more time to do whatever you want!

Platform coops in Berlin/germany

Super markt: Renovated abandoned supermarket and made it theirs. Artist led, aesthetics of money and tech.

Berling on the verge of getting sold out to out of state platforms (Airbnb, etc). Interfered with public infrastructure.

Started out from different activist movements, for fairer work. Need to use what they have learned today to make resistance movement in Berlin.

Funds for conferences, to bring people together throughout Europe (relates to Robin’s thought of small communities that build and support for more communities).

Problems for co-ops is that they can’t meet each other and don’t have enough funding.

Is this just about ways of organizing? Or about modes of production? Are we including everyone?

Try to interfere with local policy, not a research institution. (Safeguard spaces for the commons, resist privatization).

Can’t figure out what legal form…

Hard to translate this term.

Gap between digital economy and

In Japan

Digital coops -> mobilize youth.

Australia

bhive

incubator.coop: connects coop developers with coops

ylab: young people provide consultancy services to governments

open food network: OS connect producers with consumers of food, looking into multi stakeholder model

geddup: messaging app, for groups.

Coop important because of asymmetric data collection. Messaging app collects data, for whose interest is this capitalism.

Nick Srnicek platform capitalism Using data against us.

data farmer: We believe strongly that farmers should own their own data and be able to use it however they see fit. Who controls this data?

MiData, switch data things.

The movement — Uber drivers in South Africa Teresa Munchick

Collected money for family of killed driver.

Drivers are impacted by things out their control.

Brought some things to the media, to take power.

Drivers work 70–90 hours a week to make money. Taxi companies firebomb them. No health insurance.

Joseph Blasi

Oxford handbook on mutual and co-owned businesses

Cole miners in 1800s tried to start their own mine. Those around them tried to stop them.

Barriers to cooperatives.

• Credit
• Tax System
• Our minds

What is the idea?

Economic power control political power, so citizens should control where they work.

To have property earning democracy, needs to own property.

Goal: Every US institution should have profit sharing and ownership, in every sector.

• stock market companies
• medium and large companioes
• small business

How are we doing with property ownership?
* top 10% of earners own 77% of property

What about income?
* Top 10% earn 97% of capital gains and income

20% of adult workers own some share in company they work (that’s pretty good!)

Worker coops right now don’t have much per worker.

ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans)

Many more of these than worker coops.

Less than 3% of total business values are business owned.

Ideas?

• buy shares of companies companies

ESOP/ worker coop division

Use loans to get credit to buy coop with all of workers. Like mortgage on house.

Why can’t working classes get same benefits trump has when buying a casino?

Eligible Worker Owned Cooperative: federal law

Mom and Pop businesses

Conservative small business people sold their family business to workers. Owners get excused from capital gains taxes.

Buy online

As long as asset through off enough income, workers can control it. Turn consulting firms into platform coop.

Emoployees should buy twitter too.

Gig economy?

Can we give gig workers full time work and benefits?

amstead industries: worker owned blue collar is US

Take over whole industry. Like Pepsi and coke. Take over whole home healthcare industry, make it valuable.

Federal taxe

Cut taxes for businesses which share wealth with workers.

Tanny Baldwin -> bill for esops, to give loan guarantees.
Sanders has one too.

Current version of tax reform is a big barrier.

program on employee ownership and profit sharing: at Rutgers. Two conferences.

Stocksy

Stock photography.

Have goal and idea to start a business

code for america

Measure success by royalties paid out.

Recording meeting, and create transcript.

Year round, online process, for introducing changes. connection to democracy.

Platform coop for business

platform: structure/infrastructure used by all
Coop: owned by all

Platform, we usually think of Google/FB. Actually the biggest form of platform monopoly is the financial sector itself.

People dominated by capital, instead of reverse.

What about co-op bank? How do we co-op investment capital? Banks provides jobs to us through investment, we need this to be controlled by all of us.

madeline system: way for people to access market investment, based on communities.

Modo: Battling Growth: Taking on the city

20 year old car sharing co-op.

Role when replaced by driverless cars?

Advantages:

• local insights
• Keep value locally

Get people to give up their cars for community.

Similar values as democratically elected officials.

savvy

People talking about patients and how to do things for them. They didn’t talk about doing things with them. In healthcare, hard to get connection between doctor and patient.

Samer Hassan P2P Models

Challenges in gig economy

• centralized survaleillance
• disempowered communities
• concentration of profits

Can we build in another way?

• decentralized infastructure
• democratic organizations
• sharing profits

connection to govt. Maybe coops can replace government functions or supersede them in some ways?

social.coop

Instance of Mastodon micro blogging.

Problem with this?

• network effect.

Decided to try this with minimal effort.

Mastadon -> federated approach.

• furries and infosec started off community

Loomio for governance.

Open Collective for finances

bHive

Joining, pay membership. Part of shared village within geographic area. Share tools, lemons, create connections between people.

Relocalize economy.

Committed to staying connected. Being a good leader is about being exposed to emotional exposure. Create most value you can.

alia (national domestic workers alliance)

People who do domestic work don’t have access to traditional benefits.

How can home care worker collect benefits if they have many employees?

fairbnb

How can we make it better for hosts, travelers, and communities?

How do we help?

• share data with municipatlity
• remove mega host

10% of each transaction goes to community

Drive growth by

fairbnb.ca

Airbnb takes supply from long term rentals for people who want to live and diverts to short term tourists.

1. Reduces long term rental supply and increases prices
2. Makes it hard to unionize workers in lots of hotels across cities.

Push for legislation.

Data is used to make argument. Small number of hosts control most revenue.

sharetribe

Core OS platform to build platforms.

-> cycle.land

Inclusive Design Research Centre

If you plot any human needs and requirements, you see them as clustered around center. People on edges will never be addressed and they will usually be under the poverty line.

People will fall through the cracks and stranded at the edges, even if you reach out to different groups.

Guidelines:

• personal: no average
• process: make sure process is inclusive, invite the people who have the most difficulty using system
• pervasive:

platform co-op development kit: stretch to include outliers

Fill gaps that market doesn’t fill. We don’t want to create dependence on the platform, but want coops to design their own.

Aarhus makers (denmark)

Small city,

godsbanen: support cultural development there.

Market for services, artwork

affinity

Advocacy market is broken. Creates market for personal identity. Signing petition -> sell data to others.

When leader burns out, movement dies.

Open Supporter Standard -> CRM around advocacy.

Individual actors get to choose how to share.

Smart

Once they eliminated paperwork, they could scale.

Fund mutual services:

• legal advice
• career advice
• take care of debt collection

Create solutions for work environment. TO bring back collectiveness and solidarity.

Net party (argentina)

Only thing government understands is political parties

tobias koppers medium

COP 21 eco hacker camp, sucked of energy because of law problems.

Hard to find sustainable structure of groups.

We are forced to fit into hierarchal assumptions, of corporations and politics.

System is designed for corporations designed to compete in scarcity economy.

When we don’t have this outlook, when we live and breath open source and out in the open. We are pushed to the fringes, we don’t have economic power.

Open Collective: how to add mass collaboration with money. Allows economic independence without legal entity.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
If you can’t beat them, abstract them

@piamancini

Arcade city

facebook group replaces uber in Austin TX.

If you can figure out trust of transaction, this allows amazing things.

Instead of top down dictates, smaller groups forms. Group-forming networks. Participants allowed to create their own groups.

End of day thoughts

Demisch Danant — beautiful ceramic lamps of all sizes and colors!

I wanna work in that lab in city government. They are also thinking about how to make 21st century democracy online tools.

How to do this? Do a thing with code for America… build a tool in amherst?

In amherst: how to do this inclusively? Or more importantly, so I am challenging myself and opening myself to new learnings.

Look into dmv or whatever job thing I signed up for.

Columnar data? Need to also do something in this space. Learn rust. Figure out data flow thing in Clojure. Solve our problem well. Look how to generalize.

panel

Platforms are part of larger capitalistic structure of exploitation.

Part of larger trend of corporate consolidation

How do platforms play in terms of power? (Capital, social)

Illegitimate power -> We are stuck here between state regulation (possibility of authoritarianism) and corporate regulation (no oversight)

Cooperativism is strategy of survival for oppressed people to survive.

What we are doing should be good for all. And people we look at are not Petri dishes, and those in the communities should lead.

Cooperaticism centered on anti — state and anti- capitalist. Create practices that show different way of doing things.

Important in creating imagination for self and community responsibility.

Also need to move towards progressive state oriented movement.

Need coherent ideology/belief system coming from neoliberalism.

How do we construct something that is new, that isn’t just old.

Need new model of ownership that is about needs of other shareholders, coops can give us this power.

How do we grow this movement?

• Experiment with these things.
• always want more, see more possibilities
• must organize! Platform itself isn’t the movement. Isn’t just about amplification. It’s about engaging people about what our deepest desires and how to get there. People must create this pathway themselves and discover.

There is actually an ignored reality that people already do this. We see capitalism as the norm, but actually these worker owned coops exist.

Can part of this be an internal re-orientation of what we own? Which is we own ourselves? So we stop the externalizing pain as an other and own this for ourselves.

We must remember that we depend on each other for survival. And there is a better way to survive then killing each other.

What about?

• What about risky systems? Lefacy

How do we define membership? Often its hard to keep coops open. Who’s inside and outside my community? (Who do I buy from?)

How do we connect with old movements?

How to get it into senate democrat lunches? Dress it up, compare it to other things.

BLM: Not just equity, but about repairing harm thats being done. s

We started in hunter gather where tribes were cooperatives.

We wanna go with never ending stories, action instead of results, cycles.

Shared cooperatives take root in impossibility of open source, the open network, wikipedia. Internal narrative, anchor sustainability, growth in cooperation narrative. About combining this with money and with other stories that are more grounded.

Juliet Schor

elenaor ostrom: ecological sustainability

Economic democracy leads to political democracy.

Coops actually are more efficient

evergreen clevelend: scaled slowly

Platform coops? Easier to scale, easier to get funds… Low barrier to entry in a platform. So dynamics are different.

MacArthur connected consumption: studied lots of not traditional capitalist companies

Stocksy research

Unlike Airbnb, lyft, they let us publish whatever we wanted.

coop online dev contract matching?

Distinctive style and quality… Niche, but big influence. Can accept or reject any photo.

Very successful.

Challenges?

Different expectations…

art people vs business people… People come from different ideologies and background. Incredible diversity. Artists who don’t want to deal with sales, commercial interest want to deal with sellers directly, so they know what they want and can market to that.

Divide between those looking to do it full time vs on the side. Who want to make a living full time, vs not.

Hard to create common culture, because no physical space to meet. Hard to collaborate across time zones.

Economic outcomes

• Usually in coops, have more equal distribution of income. Which is a major motivation.
• However, in Stocksy, 20% earn 80% of income. More unequal than US wealth distribution.
• Is this a problem? In most coops people produce something together. In platform coop, you each produce something individually. Some producers put a lot more money into shoots.
• It attracts amazing photographers, who normally wouldn’t be in stock photo market.

They have to respond to what market wants, doesn’t have a total effect on market. Demands include white, western, etc. Hard to combat these things within existing

issue of worker coops, they can only have limited effect

Not all participate, some don’t want to. Diversity of participants.

Challenges

Stocksy is elite player. Niche player. This makes it easier to be successful, than house cleaning, home health aids, etc.

Tech

How do we stop playing catch up? Let’s stop cloning the existing models, but think about how coop allows us to do things differently? How is business models limiting to tech.

Alexander von Humboldt institute for internet and society

AI self reinforces existing assumptions and values.

Easy to ignore collection of data.

Siraman at el (2016) -> worker owned AI systems

Farmers and data

To get value, they need to combine with other farmers. Tried to start a data coop, before the big data comes in and starts stealing. Hard to get money to develop software and database and process.

John deer tractors get data, farmers don’t own. They have developed way to pull the data off with USB stick.

Allows to increase sustainability, to variably apply fertilizer, at per acre level.

Hardest part is data management costs. we can address this!!

Need lots of data to get value out of it, not about selling it, but for oneself.

Coop gives you a seat at the table….

What about personal data? Coops around these things text data? Etc?

Partnerships with other platforms.

Farmers get more income, they get more control, etc!

Midata — Health data coop in switzerland

We leak data all the time. These are relevant for health!

Capture this value for the individual and for group? How does this compare with google? What can we do that they can’t?

We need agency over this. So we can do personal analytics. Only way to do this right now is to spread around data to many different people.

Big data analytics? How do you deal with permissions of this?

Need to be able to deliver results with just one persons data. Need these to be useful!

RethinklinkNYC

We gotta know what you want, what you need, so we can give you what you…

Problems?

• we don’t own our own data!
• we didn’t decide on this
• We don’t know what the results

how to stay human Their language, is about safe spaces, freedom etc. This is from language of farmers, about individual rights etc. But really addressing same concerns. They want a say in their own data.

The process is how we win it.

Notes

Can we get data parity from platforms? We can’t stop them from getting it, but we can also get it ourselves. Let’s you use it for ourselves but also for communities to do their own analysis.

Must be trust in the system, so that members can’t be selective. Shouldn’t be able to change data just because you are in collective.

Universal declaration of human rights -> We own the data, we are the creator.

23andme -> sign away all commercial rights to your own genome

Conflict between better algorithms that use all data, but data ownership.

Lunch

Why are we here? To meet other people. Platform coops are just a facade, behind meeting other tech/union/finance intersection of people who want to talk about future, hate sharing economy.

Finance?

How to use smart contracts instead of capital to organize a cause?

Blockchain is more inclusive? We can design these currencies better to structure economies.

ourchain: coop crypto currency. Coop because there is a link between governance and crypto currency…

One member one vote, isn’t always right, need fluidity and living structure.

Question: How do we create these to disrupt centralization of power.

What could a simple use case be?

ex-Deepmind team making meatless stack of autonomous economic blockchain technology.

where does community fit in these blockchain coops? There are other forms of decentralized decision making that isn’t market driven, I think of people in Rojava self organizing in non state spaces, / where do markets begin, what are they best at, where do they harm?

What is blockchain? Distributed aggreement on facts, availability over consistency? What can you store? Ledger (bitcoin), application state (ethereum)…

Common knowledge: google/fb/etc are getting bigger because they have the most data. This is why their UI is the best.

*sorta false, they also have tons of cash and tons of smart people. You can do a lot with a little data, or with no data. *

Each of us must maintain our own personal datastore, and invite algorithms into it to get our data if we like the results. How do these people not be the gatekeepers? Who are these people?

Need way to get non technical people on board early, not later.

emineme: OS identity solution

The rate of change (metagame) of these things is super super fast.

Markets vs. governance vs/ social media are organizing technologies. These are moving too slow to coordinate against climate change.

Problem with uber is that they are expected to make huge amount, because of their evaluation. This will squeeze people on platform. If we instead use cryptocurrencies, value of token will increase with drivers and people.

Decentralized globe coming up, how do we not all perish?

faircoin: paid from coops fund communities

*fix the the problems with capitalist technology companies with extending capital even more throughout society into the decision making process and *

We already know that there can be non market solutions to group decision making

Need unit of value to get automation -> to control

“I don’t agree that capitalism runs everything. I am ready to go to war for this. I stand with the lacota Indians who see each other and are human. Fuck the technology, fuck all of you. I am a gold star veteran. I feel like I just got run over by a car and now I’m on a train going 1000mph over a precipice.”

Don’t have to turn value into a number for blockchains.

Use of blockchain for IOU , societies where when you give someone something, they give you back more. Cryptocurrencies aren’t just finance, they help you solve a problem with a decentralized governance.

Best way to build reputation is to put all your interactions on immutable blockchain record, Individual controls the keys,

Is immutability good for reputation and identity? Right to be forgotten? This is about decisions we make in community on what can be seen and unseen. Unseen is about what we can use at a further date… It’s about the laws of relations between people. Who gets to choose these things is about what really matters.

holochain

Fair pay zone — Richard (supposedly not about ownership of things with blockchain but about relationships)

TODO: add link to video of this talk, got exciting.

TOOLS FOR building culture without consensus

Culture is our base shared layer, when there are gaps here we can’t collaborate. Cultural technology…?

Building culture without leaders?

1. heirarchy
2. leaderless tyranny of structure
3. Third way?

How close to consensus should we get? Consensus: about getting to decision we can all agree with. A lot of time is spent in figuring out solutions to a problem, and looking at weird possibilities, is hellish to do!

Not ideal way to make some decisions.

Culture? Binds people together, extends into the future, when components die out.

agile learning centers: curriculum-less k-12. Building culture and space. About creating agency.

School: comes from Prussian model, where soldiers had too much agency and wouldn’t do what they were told. We need agency now.

…to change culture.

In a group with a certain set of rules, and there is no way to change that rule. Flying by the seat of my pants?

Awareness: problem statement about something as a group. (In this room all chairs facing same direction/There are ants in the kitchen.) Tensions sensed in organization.

Artist advocacy: Algorithms impact relationships in life.

Morale is low in his organization, don’t have hope about being able to change anything.

Someone taking taking too much taking space/power -> change to work is not being done equally

Community mastery board in changeup meeting

Mix up facilitator every time.

This should be done in cycles, so that these concerns can be dealt with at once. (Once a month?)

Awareness -> implementation (idea) -> practice (move here when it works) -> mastery (we have internalized).

How to move from awareness -> implementation without consensus?

You need trust of each other and facilitator. Just a try, not the solution. Then we access this after some time frame.

Sense of the meeting -> facilitator gets to decide.

If there is a ton of disagreement, convey a body to decide.

Distinction between practice and a mastery? Mastery is institutionalized in the culture.

Mastery is list of culture of group, easy to orient new people.

Conclusion — Institute for the Future

@mgorbis

20 people own as much as bottom 50% in US

Income inequality is a symptom of asset and wealth inequality. Assets let us generate incomes. Most wealth created by ownership of assets.

T picket E Suez G Zucman: inequality discussions should be focused on equalization of assets (bargaining power, human assets)

Universal basic asset

What are resources that people need today and in the future? To each an income? data?

What policies can we use to distribute these?

private

Assets that we own individually. UBI fits into here. Also retirements accounts, etc.

public

Collectively owned (government, NGO). In Denmark, those born at bottom are more likely to rise, in US not so say.

Municipal level infrastructure, fiber etc.

open community?

Anyone can access in exchange for community participation. Wikipedia, data repository.

Data is a big battleground here.

Directions

We are live in a mono-economic culture (too many unicorns), there are lots more models that we could be creating.

Bring back old things mutual benefit societies.

Non unicorns don’t have access to capital. How can we leverage public money, endowments, to fund these.

We should create new narratives about the future. Is Facebook really a community?

sapiens a brief history of mankind: unique thing about mankind is ability to create fictions.

Conclusions — wrap-up

voice and exit conference in may -> we all have the right to either hammer glass ceiling up from inside or leaving the room and build our own.

Worker owned tech coops: May first, people link, rise up, kumbit

Agile coop dev: Come up with user stories, build as you go to solve problems with everyone in the room.

Thoughts

Respect to the legacy that come before us (tribal cultures, etc)

cosmos.coop

Final questions

Resolved through the work.

Who’s problems are we solving? How do we decide what problems to solve? Who gets to decide this.

Do we look at platform coop for solutions? Or do we interrogate what the problem is?

What else isn’t solved by ownership?

Who benefits from this growing movement?

Subway thoughts

Who owns the data of the dead? In relation to the police fatalities project and to the holocaust.

Monumental books for me:

• seeing like a state
• living outside the state
• quantum mind and social science

Monumental software projects?

• dataflow?
• ___?

Monumental (formational) activities:

• contact improv

Monumental relationships

• partners
• friends
• waving to the person on the other train as we both left the station (not really)

Monumental podcasts:

• Native American

Tech Party

Lauren — coops don’t solve all problems, still have wage gap

Philsophical thinking about self ownership over work etc

Coop structure

@_donblair farmer tech

agaric Drupal tech company

My questions:

• how do we know if its a functional democracy? What are the metrics?
• How do we awknlowege outside stakeholders and our influence?

Core group does work for whole group.

blue ridge labs: people from community come to drive , experts from the community were paid, technologists were not. Ingrid Bearheart

Community level guides, we need different tools around domain knowledge from community.

People most affected should be leading development, and code signing.

enspiral group:

How do we let people build their own tools?

Websites aren’t always for the people affected. Some people don’t want to use tech. Anything you build with tech automatically excludes people. It’s about designing in a way that let’s people come in with lowest barrier.

Ask who is doing the closest thing in community to tech.

Need advice on even whether tech is the answer.

Figure out what they need, not what they say they want.

exploring economics Students who were frustrated with economics class, created virtual university

Cannot know from the beginning know what will happen. Lots of uncertainty, you need to test things. Fear of losing control and not knowing how to manage.

crisis commons: technologists come together after crisis. Little teams break out to work on assignment, come back. Break out…

Like burning man operation, decentralized. *duocracy: They reserve financial for organizations, those who are interested work on what you want. Instead of focusing on decision making, focus on doing.

Jackson, MI low income people end up leading cooperation jackson. Networks are different in different income strata. Low income have hyper local communities and resources, they have different way of decision making. Where as affluent, reach out to each other for decision making. For low income, if they can do these things in a group that they were already doing in a community instead of having to go to another meeting. Work with what you have, adept at using what people have. If you pitch coding camp, won’t bring in who you want. Instead get local need.

Problem with majority vote, is that minority viewpoint are underrepresented. Have specific committee of underrepresented people, who get first crack at voting. Lesson of voting for playdoh color, were they voting on right thing?

People often don’t know what consequences of different decisions are. People have to try things out and fail/succeed with them to see what results are.

Advocates for minority. German groups always voice dissent, form where you must always present alternatives/dissent. Darsy Leach an elusive we anti dogmatism democratic practice and the contradictory identity of the german autonomy

• katherine chen, sociology at CUNY on management structures.

sociocratic principle: interlinked circles, those make decision in that circle, then talk in links. Revisit decisions over time, to lower stakes. Need more time testing instead of building/implementing.

What is minimum thing we do to start with so that it can evolve to inclusivity over time.

Governance of group, both formal and informal.

Less about one side of our identity, figuring out who we are. This group lets me be more holistic.

checkins

Inspiral global impact visa New Zealand

Code of conduct
* randomized juries of users to judge
* not just negative but also positive behavior
* use user data to understand health of company, instead of for extraction

Death-care

• younger elders helping older elders
• burial income

Meta platform to target early users
* transparency and accountability of community
* also to see if its based on valid assumptions
* makes it easier to attract new people for team

Disrupting the disruptors paid for by the disruptors?

I might