Peer2Politics

There’s been a lot of talk lately about whether the big on-demand companies, such as TaskRabbit, Lyft and Uber, should classify their workers as employees instead of 1099 contractors, providing the benefits and protections that come with employee status. It makes sense. Freelance and on-demand workers are on their own when it comes to health insurance, retirement, disability insurance, expenses, emergency time off, and vacation pay. 

““The gist of the talk is that the rise of net culture, with it’s emphasis on collaboration, peer relationships, and social good, is changing the habits of the next generation of travellers. A large and growing cohort, mostly from developed countries, don’t want pre-packaged, mass-produced travel experiences. In fact, that’s the opposite of what they want. It’s counter to their value system. They want to hack travel, i.e. make their own travel experiences. Better yet if the hacking is done with locals and creates lasting benefits for travelers (like new skills) and their destination communities.

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these

We recently featured Open State cc as a “Project of the Day” on the P2P blog. I first heard about it while watching Dominik Wind’s excellent presentation at this year’s Ouishare Fest. As I expressed in that earlier post, “In talking with others afterwards, we agreed that it had been amongst the most powerful. While other sharing initiatives mentioned environmental conservation as a “positive element” of the mutualization of resources, there was precious little specific talk about restoration or active environmental engagement. Dominic’s talk particularly hit home within this context, as he presented it from a very intimate, familiar standpoint.”

We think that the Enspiral Network is pretty great, and that we can learn a whole lot from their P2P governance and property protocols. The following story -penned by Alanna Krause and originally published in managementexchange,com, will give you a good idea of how they keep things fresh and vibrant in the face of change.

Las Indias want to create spaces to contribute and collaborate, to co-produce with more people, and to provide an integral education for a good life.

Bruce Sterling said back in 2002 that the new political movements that would reflect the social changes that were taking shape with the start of the century would have “passion for the vote.” In the English-speaking world, we had an advance this year with Loomio, and in our cultural surroundings, with the release of the code of Democracia OS. But things are already moving politically and socially with the founding of Podemos and the debates on how to create mass online participation.Bet 1 2015 will be the year hundreds of municipalities start up the first systems of citizen co-government using the Internet.

“In a locust economy, you cannot just decide to go somewhere and get in your car to drive there. You have to coordinate with other potential users of that shared resource. You have to keep your apartment clean and sharing-ready. You have to do minimum-wage work that you might consider beneath you (though such status concerns don’t bother me, annoying chores do). In the sharing economy, we may not be eating each other literally, but we’re certainly eating into what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype of our neighbors. To the extent that your belongings are a logical expression of your genes and memes sharing them amounts to allowing others to eat them. So the harsh bottomline of the locust economies, once the Jeffersonian middle class prey base has been bankrupted, is that we locusts turn on each other. We call it peer production and prosumer economics, but it isn’t Jeffersonian producerism. It is locusts in their cannibalistic phase.”

DIWO Co-op is a worker-owned co-op located in Madrid, Spain. Recently, they were featured on the Spanish TV program “La Aventura del Saber“. This program forms part of a larger project, “La Aventura de Aprender“, which analyses the ways in which communities learn from each other and give back to the Commons.

Ever wondered about the future of travel? I was challenged to speak about it at travel industry conference in Italy. What did I know about tourism?