Peer2Politics

Joshua Vial, founder of Enspiral, one of the icons of the collaborative economy, explains what he has learned about network-based, peer-based organizational forms that can enable people to change the world and make a living from it.

Co-operatives UK, the Wales Co-operative Centre and Co-operatives and Mutuals Wales launch a new report into the potential for stimulating co-operative delivery of social care in Britain, at an event at the Senydd this evening (Tuesday 2nd July 7.00pm). The event is sponsored by Assembly Member for Pontypridd, Mick Antoniw, who chairs the cross party group on Co-operatives and Mutuals.

“The cooperative movement and cooperative enterprises are in the midst of a revival, even as some of their long-standing entities are failing. This revival is part of an ebb and flow of cooperativism, that is strongly linked to the ebb and flow of the mainstream capitalist economy. After systemic crisis such as the one in 2008, many people look at alternatives.

Welcome to the third in a series of essays exploring Wirearchy, “The power and effectiveness of people working together through connection and collaboration…taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.”

“The power and effectiveness of people working together through connection and collaboration … taking responsibility individually and collectively rather than relying on traditional hierarchical status.”

“It’s some time now, therefore, that I wonder what it means to create a futureproof business, and recently I have often wondered if this is still a topic of interest. One thing that I pondered often lately is the trends related to S&P500 dynamism. If you look at the history of this index you find that, while in 1958 a company could expect to stay in the S&P for an average of sixty years, today the average number of years is decreased to 18 (and is decreasing regularly). So: what does it mean to prosper? Is it about having a long life? Is it about adaptability? And what about the brand when products become platforms?

The Synthetic Biology Project spoke with Rob Carlson of Biodesic at SynBioBeta in November 2012.

Watch the neat video here:

Guerrilla Translation: Ouishare Awards 2014

In 2002 I described United Diversity as “a member owned and stakeholder governed network of mutual advantage.” In truth, it was aspirational. At the time, the flexible off-the-shelf legal structures and open source tools needed to make such a network a reality simply didn’t exist. Now they do. Co-ops that combine best practices from the international co-operative movement with best practices from the open source software and hardware communities are now possible. Soon anyone will be able to set up an Open Co-op and invite all their stakeholders to help finance, govern and organise the co-op online.

The General Assembly of the Catalan Integral Cooperative has confirmed a proposed partnership with the P2P Foundation.

Uber made plenty of headlines during a huge winter storm in New York in December, when riders found themselves paying three times the normal price to hail a car in the middle of the snow and frozen rain. Uber founder Travis Kalanick defended the “surge pricing” as a way to provide an incentive to drivers to stay out on the streets; but to many riders, the experience didn’t feel a whole lot like sharing. And as I learned all too well when I tried to use AirBnB to find a room in Austin, Texas, during the SXSW festival last year, Austin’s AirBnB hosts weren’t a bunch of Good Samaritans looking to lend out their couches — they were cold hard capitalists dedicated to charge as much as the market could possibly bear.

The Open Food Network is a free, open source project aimed at supporting diverse food enterprises and easy access to local and sustainable food.They’re not only addressing one of the critical issues of our time (and future), they’re also “…proudly open source and not for profit”, working under P2P protocols. Please support their current crowdfunding campaign. Watch the video, read the campaign description below,  and spread the word about this most inspiring initiative. We hope to see many Open Food Networks around the world; we believe that this campaign is a critical step towards the attainment of that goal.

Adam W. Parsons of www.sharing.org, writing for dissidentvoice.org, provides a clear explanation of the encroaching enclosure of the commons and tendency for existing social relationships to become monetized, ironically under the monicker of the ‘sharing economy’, and suggests ways in which true P2P sharing matrices can be strengthened.

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.

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.

In the quest to imagine and build a new “sharing economy,” one factor that is often overlooked is law.  What shall be the role of formal law in a world of social enterprises, shared workspaces, cohousing, car-sharing groups, tool-lending libraries, local currencies and crowdfunding?  Who has legal rights in these various contexts, and what do they look like?  Who holds the legal liabilities?

A testimony from Rob Carlson:

“Auroville, an international township in South India, was founded in 1968. On a heavily eroded plateau, close to the Bay of Bengal near Pondicherry, a small group of about 200 pioneers set out to reforest the barren land and create a new socio-economic, ecological and spiritual habitat with a vision to build “a city the Earth needs”. Forty years later, a vibrant community of almost 2,000 people from 43 nations had emerged, providing employment to some 4,000 men and women from nearby villages. Meanwhile, they had reforested thousands of acres of land, built homes, health centres and schools, developed organic farms, experimented with renewable energy and cost-effective building technologies, reached out to the neighbouring villages, and set up a plethora of businesses and services.

Hangout conversatoin between the P2P Value research team and the Sensorica team about the open value accounting .