“Who Owns the World?”
Takeaways and future directions
Who Owns the World? The State of Platform Cooperativism
Who Owns the World? The State of Platform Cooperativism is a platform cooperative conference hosted by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC)at the The New School, New York, New York, USA that was held from November 7 to 9 this year.
Pictures from the Conference: https://flickr.com/photos/treborscholz/albums/72157711739075488/with/49082459592/
The conference covered the current state of platform cooperativism, practices for cooperatives, international perspectives on platform cooperativism, startup funding, the use of platforms for resolving societal and economic issues, data governance and data cooperatives, and distributed governance.
The conference (We did not attend the conference. Rather, we watched the conference via a live-stream), at least form our view, was very good because it touched upon so many different topics in the platform cooperative space and highlighted different sectors and approaches that can be incorporated to help change the platform economy paradigm.
We were also very happy to see a discussion of blockchain cooperatives, though not specifically focused on the technology, but on cooperatives who employ blockchain to build their platforms.
Our major takeaways from the conference are generally related to our views and interests in decentralized and open thinking and systems (DOTS) concepts.
Takeaways:
- Greater emphasis on leadership training, and taking a page from Decred, a need for distributed leadership (alternatively, de-leadership) in which all participants are empowered and active in the decision-making processes (very similar to a do-ocracy)
- We need a bigger move to empower the platform cooperative model in the fields of data (governance, sharing, collection, usage, privacy, storage, etc.), mobility, freelancers (refer to Opolis for a blockchain cooperative for freelancers), energy (though this is more prevalent in rural areas in the USA, but we can have them in urban areas as well through projects like the Brooklyn Microgrid), internet (by building community wireless networks; this might be one of the biggest areas that is completely being missed out on. I mean, do you know anyone that likes Comcast?), and identity (self-sovereign identity (SSID) services)
- We need to develop more protocols via platform cooperatives so that we can provide cooperative infrastructure for platform coops and other companies to build frameworks and platforms on. Without a hold on infrastructure, it will be very difficult to change
- Is there a need for rebranding cooperatives into something that is more appealing to the general public?
- We need to consider new, innovative and fair funding models that can grow the ecosystem in a non-extractive manner.
- There needs to be more research focused on platform cooperativism, distributed governance, and technology usability
From our key takeaways, we thought of a couple decentralized and open thinking and systems (DOTS) related concepts that may be beneficial:
- Cooperatives should consider adopting Token Bonding Curves for membership, a la Nexus Mutual, a decentralized insurance mutual (we would consider Nexus Mutual a blockchain cooperative)
- Cooperatives should consider the Continuous Securities Offering (CSO) model for raising capital by offering equity on the blockchain
- Platform cooperative should consider offering self-sovereign identity services (SSID), data-related services, based on DOTS-related technologies
- More research should be done on DOTS-related technology usability and governance principles for cooperatives
Excerpt from “Who Owns the World?”, Research, Services and Open Roles, Originally published on the Ledgerback Substack Newlsetter
