Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Fairbnb.coop is a platform co-op whose name precedes it. Everyone’s heard of the venture-capital-backed alternative that’s putting hotels and traditional B&Bs out of business, and Fairbnb.coop is the antithesis of that – a platform co-op which puts ethics back into home-sharing.
One of the worst effects of capitalist realism is the endless bad-mouthing of alternatives to its toxicity. With this in mind, I’d like to share with you some extraordinary examples of imaginative prototyping exercises towards commons-oriented futures — presented by the very people who will bring them about in the face of darker possibilities.
If Guerrilla Translation is a co-op, think of the co-op members as shareholders. Okay, like in an evil corporation, but bear with us. Each member is an owner, holding different types of shares in the collective.
Resonate is a music streaming co-op and a great example of a platform co-op which is changing the way business works. In the run up to the OPEN 2018 Platform Co-op conference we interviewed Peter Harris, Resonate Founder and CEO.
Beyond critiques of the Silicon Valley-style “sharing economy”, Open Cooperativism questions the dominance of capital in the free and open source software economy, and suggests P2P-empowered digital solutions in order to lower the transactional costs of networked cooperative production.
The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement…and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements
AnyShare has bold plans to help the world. By creating a multi-stakeholder platform cooperative, the Arizona-based organization wants to support local exchange groups and sharing communities.
Can we envision some sort of transnational polity that could leapfrog over the poorly functioning state systems that prevail today?
So what might a commons-based economy actually look like in its broadest dimensions, and how might we achieve it?
Unlike their traditional for-profit counterparts, Open Cooperatives are oriented towards the common good in their statutes.
