During this festival, which was collaboratively organized and co-designed with our community, 700 international professionals gathered for two days of keynotes, panels, workshops and open sessions about the collaborative economy at the Cabaret Sauvage in Paris. On the third open day, over 3 000 visitors passed through the Cabaret to discover the collaborative economy through a variety of in and outdoor activities, catering to all ages, such as disco soupe, trade school, an upcycling art gathering and a t-shirt printing workshop.

Other highlights of OuiShare Fest included the Wikihouse, the first FabJam, a satellite event in Brazil, the OuiShare Fest Awards and an evening workshop on Thursday night called the public policy jam. This workshop gathered speakers and partners of OuiShare Fest to discuss opportunities and issues of public policy and the sharing economy. You can read about the outcomes of the workshop here.

For more in-depth insights on OuiShare Fest, read what Shareable, Meedabyte, FT ALphaville & El Mundo (Spanish), and La Tribune (French) had to say about it, or check out our reviews of day 1 and day 2.

The sense of optimism amongst the crowd was intoxicating. There was a distinct feeling that as the old economy lagged, this mysterious collaborative economy thing was booming like never before. — Izabella Kaminska, FT Alphaville

What we liked most

Even though it’s hard to chose, we asked the team and here are the top 5 things we liked about OuiShare Fest:

1. You

What made OuiShare Fest unique were the people. It brought together such diverse, but at the same time likeminded people from all over the world in one place. This made for some great encounters and rich conversations.

“Everyone was there, from business oriented people to moneyless guys like Elf Pavlik or Raphael Fellmer” – Cristobal Gracia

“I didn’t have a single boring conversation” – Albert Cañigueral

2. The Spirit

The atmosphere was very different from other professional events. Everyone’s good mood and optimism were a source of inspiration. Take a look at the countless pictures, videos and tweets on the OuiShare Fest blog and our special live reporting site to experience the spirit of the event.

“Things weren’t taken too seriously, the element of fun and play was always present.” – Juho Makkonen

3. Intense MPRL

We finally got to meet so many people we have connected with online in real life! OuiShare Fest was an opportunity for intense MPRL (meeting in real life) and created links between on and offline relationships.

4. The Content

The program was filled with content that was practical and applied to real life cases. The favorites: Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation), Dale Dougherty (Make) & Alastair Parvin (Wikihouse).

The good news: you can watch all sessions online! Since we had sessions in three different rooms simultaneously, we made sure to capture all of them on video and are now uploading them on our Youtube channel. Many are already available, but stay posted for more in the next weeks.

5. The Volunteers

OuiShare Fest would have never happened without the incredible dedication and motivation of all our volunteers, who came from near and far to give their passion and energy to make this event happen. Thank you!
“The impossible is possible with the right team” – Jusytna Swat
And my personal favorite: ”Changing the world while doing the dishes.” – Edwin Mootoosamy

And not to forget, on top of our volunteers, we had a great team that worked on this event for several months.

Would you like to be part of it next time? Since many OuiShare Fest attendees asked us how they could get involved in OuiShare in the future, you can read how below:

The best way to start is to come to an event like OuiShare Fest (or any other event) to meet members of the team in real life (an important principle laid down in our values). You can find out when the next event in your region or city is taking place by joining your local Facebook group or getting in touch with your local OuiShare Connector (who is basically an active member of OuiShare who is building the community in one region). If there is a specific topic you are interested in, we also have vertical groups for topics such as mobility, finance, education, food, policy and many more. See a full list of all our groups here on Facebook. If you join a group, it is important that you introduce yourself there, so everyone in the group knows who you are. This is a crucial ingredient to keeping our groups active.

But always remember: we’re in permanent beta. OuiShare is an ongoing experiment that is made by its participants. If you have any questions or you need help getting involved, don’t hesitate to reach out to anyone from the team and we will be more than happy to help you.

See you next year?

If you missed OuiShare Fest this year, don’t worry – since it was such a success, we’re definitely having another one!

And lastly, one last big thank you goes to our co-organizer La Fonderie, our partners La Poste, La Banque Postale, Google and all our other partners, volunteers and speakers who helped us make this event reality!

Photo Credits:
Flickr Slideshow images by Sandrine Landrix
Header image by  Stefano Borghi

Cet article 5 Things We Liked Most About OuiShare Fest est apparu en premier sur OuiShare.

Since its launch in 2009, Bitcoin has turned from a crypto-anarchist project into a hype topic in the worldwide web community and beyond. From London’s squats to Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood: not everyone uses Bitcoin, but everyone is talking about it.

Bitcoin can be described as a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, in other words a distributed monetary system that enables anonymous and relatively secure transactions without any centralized authority. Instead of being issued through an opaque banking system, Bitcoin units are created by each of its users, thanks to an open-source software and a smart algorithm that makes the whole distributed system secure and anonymous. As a result, there is no need for a centralized authority to run Bitcoin. Instead, the system controls itself.

Everyone agrees that Bitcoin is an amazing proof of concept from a technical standpoint, and has succeeded in raising much awareness for the current flaws of the monetary system. But does Bitcoin really address these flaws?  More and more prominent economists and net activists say no.

“A system designed to create bitcoin billionaires”

Bitcoin faces two types of criticism. The first is technical: Bitcoin is an anonymous and authority-less currency, which is eventually of great help to drug dealers, weapons sellers and anyone operating on the black market. Dropis’ founder Sebastiano Scròfina also listed several others criticisms, but the most crucial one is more economic than technical: it is related to Bitcoin’s design as a currency.

“Bitcoin is designed by people who believe in a certain type of economy, it is designed to be like gold, privileging hoarding” Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation

Bitcoin can be described as a deflationary currency, or even a mere (virtual) commodity. Like gold, bitcoins are valuable because of their scarcity — Bitcoin’s money supply is limited to 21 million of units. A feature, according to libertarians and gold standard advocates, yet a bug for many. The prominent Greek economists Yannis Varoufakis recently posted a very smart paper explaining the problem this causes:

To put it simply, if bitcoin succeeds in penetrating the marketplace, an increasing quantity of new goods and services will be traded in bitcoin. By definition, the rate of increase in that quantity will outpace the rate of increase in the supply of bitcoins. In short, a restricted supply of bitcoins will be chasing after an increasing number of goods and services. Thus, the available quantity of bitcoins per each unit of goods and services will be falling causing deflation.”

Which is bad, Felix Salmon says:

Inflation is bad, but deflation is worse. The reason is that in a deflationary environment, no one spends money — because whatever you want to buy is sure to become cheaper in a few days or weeks. People hoard their cash, and spend it only begrudgingly, on absolute necessities. And they certainly don’t spend it on hiring people — no matter how productive their employees might be, they’d still be better off just holding on to that money and not paying anybody anything.

Another way to put it: since bitcoin units are being created at an increasingly slower pace while more and more users join the currency, the value of each unit can only rise. Thereby, new entrants only have a smaller share of the Bitcoin monetary mass — unless they are rich enough to buy more bitcoin against official foreign currencies.

Bitcoin is about creating asymmetry and inequality where there is none,” concludes Financial Times’ journalist Izabella Kaminska, ”It’s a system designed to create bitcoin millionaires.

The Bitcoin elite: 78 entities

Those Bitcoin millionaires are not a myth. By examining the entire Bitcoin graph (pdf) as of July 12th 2011, researchers Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir have found very insightful results. First, they estimated that 59.7% of the Bitcoin coins are dormant, which means the majority of the coins are saved rather than spent in the system. Second and more interesting, they found that 97% of Bitcoin accounts contain less than 10 bitcoins, while a handful of 78 entities are hoarding more than 10,000 Bitcoins. Last but not least, the researchers identified only 364 transactions with more than 50,000 Bitcoins. “All these large transactions were descendants of a single transaction which was carried out in November 2010,” their paper concludes.

So basically you have a group of happy few people controlling the vast majority of all Bitcoins. But who could these guys be? Well, some further research led by Sergio Lerner suggests that one of those bitcoin millionaires is the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged inventor of Bitcoin. Since Nakamoto was most certainly the first Bitcoin user to make a transaction, Lerner could trace all of his account’s activity and found that he must own about 980K Bitcoins, which equal about 110 million dollars with today’s exchange rate.

If you are unsure what to think of this, here is Wikileaks’ Julian Assange’s take on the issue:

That means that you should get into the Bitcoin system now. Early. You should be an early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be worth a lot of money one day. — Julian Assange, June 2011

‘How would Bitcoin help the Greeks?’

“How would Bitcoin help the Greeks?” asks Scròfina cynically. In terms of wealth inequality, one could expect better from an alleged ‘P2P currency’.

The Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis draws the conclusion that the idea of a “de-politicised currency capable of ‘powering’ an advanced, industrial society” is a fantasy. He argues:

Would it be possible to calibrate the long-term supply of bitcoins in such a way as to ameliorate for the deflationary effects while tilting the balance from speculative to transactions demand for bitcoins? To do so we would need a Bitcoin Central Bank, which will of course defeat the very purpose of having a fully decentralised digital currency like bitcoin.”

Does it mean the idealistic project of a decentralized currency is dead? Not all Bitcoin detractors agree.

Michel Bauwens — whose institution, the P2P Foundation made use of Bitcoin very early — has also sensibly withdrawn his support of the digital currency and expressed strong criticism during a talk at OuiShare Fest in May 2013. But contrary to Varoufakis, he remains optimistic:

Thank you Bitcoin for doing this, because now we can do something better — Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation

A statement warmly applauded by the audience, reflecting two days of intense discussions around virtual currencies, and a wide consensus on the need for something else.

After Bitcoin and beyond scarcity

At a panel at OuiShare Fest on Virtual Currencies, everyone agreed on the principle that next currencies should be based on trust, and help the real economy. But where to start?

“We need to dismantle the idea that money should be a commodity, a store of value” Dropis’ Scròfina says. In these interesting slides, he argues for a post-scarcity money system:

An analysis Izabella Kaminska mostly agrees with:

We must stop thinking in monetary terms, we must look at the real wealth that surrounds us. The overall growth in the standard of living of the world. The wealth is there, it just needs better distribution.

Like Varoufakis, Kaminska thinks this is the role of public institutions. But can this be done with a stateless decentralized currency?

Many alternative digital currencies projects are attempting to achieve this. Freicoin and Litecoin for instance, are two projects forked from the Bitcoin source code, with tangible differences though. The first one has a larger money supply (up to 84,000 million units) which makes it easier to mine, while Freicoin — which means “Free Money” in German – can expand up to 100,000 units. On top of that, Freicoin has a demurrage fee: the coins lose about 5% of their value each year. The website explains:

Demurrage forces the entire stock of money to circulate irrespective of the desire of the wealthy to accumulate and store; banks, financiers, and corporations can no longer hoard money waiting for higher interest rates or a more favorable investment climate as the demurrage acts as a tax on stagnant money. Money is eternally losing value, so the incentive is to spend it as quickly as possible on the necessities of life or to invest in longer-term ventures that also provide stimulus for a growing economy, typically creating real jobs in the process.

Another project called Ripple was mentioned many times to me when working on this paper. Ripple is not only a virtual currency, it is above all a payment protocol that can be used with any currency like Bitcoin, or even Euros and Dollars. What Ripple does is enhance P2P payment systems based on already existent social networks by turning them into trust networks and transaction pathways.

The French project called Open Universal Dividend Currency (open UDC) is even more radical. “In Bitcoin, the peers are the computers, not humans” Michel Bauwens said at OuiShare Fest. Open UDC, however, is just the opposite.

Like Bitcoin, Open UDC is a decentralized protocol for currencies that prevents double spending and fraud. But the major feature of this currency is the fact that every member of the currency will periodically receive the equal dividend of money, similarly to a basic income. How does it work? Unlike other digital currencies embedding a basic income like OCCCU, the alternative currency powered by Occupy Wall Street, you don’t even need demurrage or taxes to give money to people. Open UDC simply issues the money, ‘out of thin air’ — but not in a foolish way.

Open UDC is not operational yet, but the ratio of money creation would be defined by an algorithm, determined by two factors: the number of participants using Open UDC, and the average life expectancy within the community. The idea in Open UDC is that throughout his lifetime, every member should get the same relative share of money creation than everyone else. As a consequence, “the monetary mass is continuously expanding and thus prevents a minority to hoard too much units at the expense of the others.” a contributor of the project explained to me. “The system makes enough room for the new comers, so that anyone can start trading without having to go into debt in the first place.”

Hence the description of the project on the official website: ”OpenUDC implementations allow human members to exchange digital goods and services with a spirit of equity in space, between members, and time, between members and future members.”

Changing the culture of money

Is the perfect currency at hand then? Sebastiano Scròfina is more nuanced: “In theory Open UDC would work, but in practice, it’s not enough to have the protocol. You need a community of people that trust each other first.”

It is ironic that the success of Bitcoin is actually based on the opposite concept: mistrust. Bitcoin is made so that people don’t owe each other anything. They just carry out transactions and disappear.

Bitcoin, in that sense, is anti democratic. It’s based on mistrust rather than trust, it refuses to take any responsibility onto itself – indeed, it doesn’t even have a self to take responsibility onto. It’s nihilistic, and an attractive alternative only to things which are downright bad. — Felix Salmon

At this stage, you may wonder: if Bitcoin is so bad, why do so many people use it?

It’s probably because in the end, money is a question of Culture: as long as people think that money should be a commodity, they will prefer currencies that allow accumulation, speculation and competition.

Fortunately, the growing sharing economy is surely changing our culture by creating more and more abundance and reassessing the human as an essential unit of the economy. If we truly believe in the values behind the collaborative economy, it is time to push our ambition further and create the decentralized, human-based currency systems that the emerging new economy deserves.

Credit picture  zcopley  keep_bitcoin_real

Cet article Game over, Bitcoin. Where is the next human-based digital currency? est apparu en premier sur OuiShare.

During Ouishare Fest I had the opportunity to give a talk on the words, meanings and issues of the collaborative economy. As you know, the right questions are more important than the right answers, and so I’d like to share my questions here on ouishare.net with you.

I’ve been following the development of the collaborative economy since 2009, and my feeling today is that we are entering an age of maturity. While increasing visibility is still a priority, the collaborative economy faces several challenges, and this raises some questions.

Understand your audience

To me, the first challenge is to understand the audience of the collaborative economy. Studies show that sharing is an emerging consumption habit, and that people who share are more driven by economic benefits than by collective motivations. This is not a trend against traditional consumption — most of these people are just looking for good deals and ways to earn money.

It has been proven that 52% of the population, in France and in the US, wants to change its consumption habits. A full 83% of the French population feels usage is more important than ownership, but only 19% of them have already tried to rent what they need (Obsoco, November 2012)

A study made by French survey institute IPSOS and the Government Agency ADEME recently showed that 60% of French people use second hand markets and 37% of them use group purchasing. Less than 10% of the population engages in bartering and ridesharing. Collaborative consumption is more developed among young people, but it also spans across other segments of the population.

This means collaborative consumption can suit everyone for various reasons, and the fact that we have no word to name the people who share just reflects the diversity of these emerging consumption habits.

So the question is: do we need a common name for these people to recognize each other? Or do we need to better define the collaborative economy in order to improve its promotion?

Try to solve a problem

I ask about defining who the sharing population is because of my second point: it’s necessary to promote this economy more largely. Except for Airbnb, Zipcar, Blablacar and some other success stories, many startup businesses are just fighting to survive and reach a critical mass of users.  Moreover, some ideas are really nice in theory, but not that useful in practice.

Adam Berk, who founded and recently put an end to neigh*borrow in the US, recently said on Pandodaily that sharing is not enough: he advises young entrepreneurs to try to solve a problem, to rapidly test their idea in their surroundings (“If you can’t find 10 persons to use your product, you can’t find 100” he says), not to reinvent the wheel, and admit that sometimes an idea simply does not work.

Neal Gorenflo, founder of Shareable, also explains that the money coming from venture capital simply changes the spirit of the collaborative economy. But what is the true spirit of the collaborative economy? And if people are willing to participate but do not actually do so, how can we find ways to convince people more broadly?

Define your values

And this leads me to the third challenge: values. The collaborative economy consists of different developments such as collaborative lifestyles, redistribution markets, barter, co-construction habits, crowdfunding, etc. Depending on your business model, you can make a profit or not – but does this movement have any clear claim or statement?

For some people, it’s a catch-all term and it’s perhaps risky for it not to be more specific.

Simplicity, transparency, community, and participation are often cited as being the foundation of the collaborative economy. Authenticity, sustainability, co-creation, and social efficiency are some of its core values. But are these terms specific enough for people to grasp what the collaborative economy is about?

What’s more, not all startup businesses share these values. So what are the TRUE values of this economy? If we don’t make this clear enough, then words like “collaborative” and “sharing” will soon lose their meaning.

Look at the giants

Fourth: let’s look to well-known speakers and analysts on the collaborative economy. Rachel Botsman and Lisa Gansky have clearly defined the main rules of the collaborative economy, but there are others. Jeremy Rikfin is known for his books on empathy and the third industrial revolution. Bernard Stiegler, French philosopher, prefers speaking about a contributive economy, while Chris Anderson and Joël de Rosnay underline the importance of the makers’ movement. And Yochai Benkler speaks about the “networked information economy” to describe a “system of production, distribution, and consumption” based on open source, decentralization, and non-market strategy.

In the end, the collaborative economy is in the middle of all these contributions, made up of thousands of innovations — some for profit, some non-profit — and some that thrive in the commons… Does this mean that the future of the economy will be collaborative?

Look to the cooperative economy

If we accept this idea, it’s important not to reinvent the wheel! At the end of the 1880s some workers had already built the foundations of a cooperative economy, and now we often forget that more than 800 million people worldwide are members of some form of cooperative. This economy is still causing debates over whether traditional approaches are better than the one offered by the American approach of social entrepreneurship. All in all, it is never easy, but I do believe that

the collaborative economy needs to learn from the history of cooperative systems to distinguish itself more clearly from the “mainstream” economy.

Help promote a greener economy

Have you seen how often ecological arguments are presented in the collaborative economy? My interest in these issues is directly linked to the capacity of the collaborative economy to build a better world for the next generations.

There are some figures to demonstrate the environmental impact of the collaborative economy. For example, every shared car replaces up to fifteen owned cars — sharing reduces waste, it counter acts planned obsolescence, it promotes local economies, and more.

But these are the consequences! What if these solutions were made to directly serve green purposes? What if the collaborative economy decided to more strongly defend a green economy? Wouldn’t that make the connection between sharing and the environment much clearer?

As Neal Gorenflo recently said in a OuiShare discussion group, “we expect that these tech driven solutions could become part of, if not lead, a larger movement of social and economic transformation.” It is necessary to always keep in mind this larger goal, and to include it in the vision of the collaborative economy.

Work together

Now that venture capitalists and other investors are beginning to invest their money in young start-ups, it is important to protect the movement’s core values — if we can define them. Should we defend the people’s benefits or the stakeholders’ benefits? Is there more collaboration than we would expect among collaborative economy startups?

If we are just focused on technological innovation, and suffer from the possible counterproductive influence of venture capital investment, I don’t give the future of the collaborative economy much of a chance.

All in all, you see, it’s the economy, stupid! But it can be much more than that, and I would be pleased to hear if you might have some answers to my questions!

Picture credit: thethingswesay.com  Gayané Adourian

Cet article Seven Challenges for the Collaborative Economy est apparu en premier sur OuiShare.

1. Do it as an innovation platform.

In order to succeed in the collaboration world, you cannot just think of yourself as a content provider. Instead, you must see yourself as a curator; someone who creates a context or a platform that allows other people to self-organize and create things that are valuable, both for you and for them and maybe even for the world.

In the networked age, organizations can now develop their own performance. They can create a platform for innovation that taps into the power of a larger, more diverse and ultimately more capable network of contributors than one could ever find in a single organization. Building open and intelligent networks for transportation innovation will enable communities to form around shared problems.

If people are going to hack your products anyway, then you mind as well get ahead of the game and include them into your process instead of suing them.

Make your products modular, re-configurable and editable. Supply the raw materials so that collaborators can add value to your product and make it easier to remix and share. The advantage is that you will always be able to count on a dynamic and fertile ecosystem for growth and innovation.

Finally, don’t expect a free ride. Your collaborators will increasingly expect shares in things they helped build but will also be willing to contribute more if you make it profitable for potential collaborators to get involved.

2. Rethinking the commons.

All organizations should abandon their fortress mentality and open up by sharing some of their assets within their business networks or even beyond. Why? Because sharing is about attaining growth, innovation and profits. It is true that companies need to protect critical intellectual property (IP), but at the same time they would not be able to collaborate effectively if their IPs was hidden. So to make collaboration work for your organization, you will need to selectively put intellectual property and other assets up for grabs, thus allowing new projects and opportunities for collaboration to emerge. This might sound like a potential threat to businesses; yet in fact it is an opportunity for organizations to discover new grounds for creativity, both inside and outside the borders of their organization.

What Knowledge Work Should You Outsource, HBR

There are many ways for an organization to “let go”: it can mean giving your employees more freedom and more flexibility to innovate and co-create with their peers, it can mean tapping into your suppliers and partners for ideas and collaborating more closely on product design and manufacturing. It can mean sharing at least some of your assets with the public to expand your reach or help attract a larger network of contributors. It can mean letting a loyal and engaged community of enthusiasts help grow your brand. In making the decision to outsource, organizations should consider strategy as well as cost: Does having direct ownership of your work confer any competitive advantage?

If so, keep that work in-house and make sure that those responsible for the work are freed from lower-value tasks that others could accomplish. But if you decide to outsource the work,  you need to think about how large the potential benefit of this is for the organization. If there is a benefit, outsource this work and make it open for any external help. This sharing however comes with its own challenges, since it means less control and requires practitioners to learn and abide by the rules of scientific and creative communities. It means investing in infrastructures for collaboration while carefully considering when and how to distribute rewards and profits within the community.

To make sharing work you’ll need to reveal your intellectual property to the right networks to let it spawn knowledge creation and innovation. You’ll need to stay connected to the community so you can leverage new contributions as they come in, and also need to dedicate resources to filtering and aggregating contributions.

3. Create a culture of collaboration.

The hardest challenge for anyone who wants to transform their institution in the networked age is to deepen and broaden the culture of collaboration. To make this work for you, you have to be genuinely open to new ideas. The first place to start with is your own workplace. Try to come up with incentives rewarding group performance rather than individual performance. By doing so, you set an example through your own behavior in the way you collaborate and share information, and direct the organization toward a common goal.

To turn your organization into a collaborative workplace, the organization’s leaders must recognize that collaboration is essential for reaching their common goal. Therefore you will need to devote many of your resources to attain full collaboration. You must relentlessly communicate the need to make enhanced collaboration a success, sustain the momentum, and then describe the next steps.

4. Find and strengthen the vanguard.

Collaborative communities cannot get off the ground without a core group of leaders who establish the vision and community values, and attract more people to the ecosystem.

This small group provides the social capital and technical infrastructure that other participants can build on and sets the tone of the community. This group can also have a profound influence on the type of community that evolves, especially since newcomers tend to model their behavior on what they have already observed. Communities that create things develop their own rules that govern issues such as communications, appropriations, and the form and manner of contribution.

Providing incentives certainly will help motivate the vanguard to be successful. Let them expand gradually and tackle collaboration as real work, not as a distraction.

Moreover, empower the group through its collective intelligence by following the principles layed down in the book “Wisdom of Crowds“, namely diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation.

Empowering the Professional–Amateur (Pro-Am) helps you build ‘social capital’: Networks of relationships that allow people to collaborate, share ideas and take risks together. ‘Social capital’ can help glue a society together and allow people to trust each other, thus encouraging them to change collaboratively and share risks. Their distaste for hierarchy and preference for collaboration are forcing organizations to rethink how they recruit, compensate, develop, and supervise talent. Companies can leverage this to seek out fresh insight to build better products, services, and even strong a brand.

Unfortunately, most organizations and institutions do a pretty poor job of engaging young people. Smart companies understand that tools and platforms such as Facebook and other social media are becoming the new operating system for their businesses. And these tools come naturally to the new generation, like the air they breathe.

A longer version of this article was previously published on Ahmad’s blog. 

photo credit: Werkheim via photopin cc

Cet article How to Build a Collaborative Organization est apparu en premier sur OuiShare.

Think Globally, Buy Locally?

Consumers are able to buy almost everything online now if they choose. The Economist recently published an article on the uncertain future of the “bricks & mortar” bookshop. The Guardian predicts that the online grocery market will “double within five years.” All these predictions lead one to believe that the only value left in a bricks & mortar shop is to display consumer goods as an art gallery would. But whereas in an art gallery the items are for sale, the shops will only be for you to look, touch and feel; nothing will be for sale and all of your purchases will be made later either at home or with a smartphone.

It’s already happening with many people I know: they go to shops to find what they like and then order the same item online for less money (including shipping).

It’s a  fetishization of the consumer product where the display model is adored in public but your personal version will come from a dark warehouse on the outskirts of the city and be delivered to your house discreetly. Unfortunately for the offline shop owners, all they get out of this is worn-out merchandise and shrinking profits.

Delivering the Goods

Despite some obstacles along the way, Ocado is planning on opening another massive warehouse in order to better dominate the grocery home delivery market. They have a lot of competition, there’s Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. And if you think this trend is limited to the UK, think again: around the world retailers are delivering food to your house, even KFC and MacDo’s. Amazon is even planning on having same-day delivery.

It seems that as we try to reduce congestion and increase mobility in cities by reducing car use, we seem to be simultaneously replacing that traffic with delivery vehicles that are all rushing to get there on time for the scheduled delivery appointment (and sometimes causing fatalities along the way). And even if you think that public transport and cycling has dramatically reduced the number of vehicles on the road, you’re wrong; passenger cars still accounted  for 84.1% of inland passenger transport in the EU-27 in 2010.

Ironically, another contributor to the problem of congestion are the proposed remedies themselves. In Paris for example, the Velib scheme is great for getting more people to use bikes, but what if everyone is going to the same place? All the bikes wind up downtown and trucks are needed to bring them back to empty docking spaces where people are waiting (incidentally, one of the most effective bike scheme is actually in Berlin, where there are no docking stations and bikes are just left around randomly).

When Will it Get Here?

Combating the ubiquity of delivery trucks and scooters is a new scheme that is growing in popularity: Cargo Bikes! You may have seen them around your city already, but get ready for more; there is a European Cycle Logistics Federation forming as we speak.

On an urban scale this seems like a clean, quiet, healthy and safe form of transport for local products, especially when you consider this “BentoBox” plan in Berlin is actually one step closer to the physical internet project envisioned by CELDi.

The physical internet would allow for open hubs where products could be stored for people to come pick them up and deliver them to another hub, closer still to the destination and thus could break up the large job of transporting objects into small manageable pieces using the natural movements happening within the city. And the movements within a city are so predictable that the London based artist Danja Vasilev once created a “parasitic” internet using the daily motion of people and traffic in the city. It is the most illuminating illustration of what can be accomplished when you combine P2P thinking and urban mobility.

International Transport

The P2P community has already created some solutions for international transport with sites like CanUBring, mmMule, and PiggyBee. These sites allow people that are already travelling to bring goods with them to people in the cities they are travelling to. After studying these sites for some time it appears that the problem of intermodality still poses a threat to widespread take-up.

I have tried to carry goods for all these sites to various cities around Europe (I travel very frequently). I tried bringing an iPhone to Moscow to sell, but the buyer changed his mind the night before I flew. I tried ordering some Czech beer from someone who was coming to London but they were arriving in Luton and travelling northwards afterwards so this made it impossible for me to collect the goods. Since I offered to carry goods and even buy goods with about a dozen users of these sites and none of these attempts resulted in a transaction, I have come to the conclusion that

Until there is a P2P service or “Physical Internet” to facilitate the delivery of an object to the final destination, then these services will remain a hobby of fringe travelers and not regular international commuters.

Interoperability between Actors

We can already see some signs of consolidation in the P2P transport world. In France some ridesharing actors have started a common specification for rideshare offers. And in the UK there has been a move towards standardization of rideshares. Imagine now if there was one big grid of users, all willing to transport, carry or deliver certain goods in their vehicles or baggage.

This would break the large task carrying honey from Greece to a friend in Belgium into several small tasks. I hypothesize that: a local (village) honey producer will sell a product online, the producer will give it to a cyclist going to the train station, a train traveler will take the honey to Athens, then carpool with another traveler who will take the honey to the airport when they have a flight, a business traveler will meet the other traveler and take the honey to Brussels where an airport employee just getting off work will take it to the centre of town where the intended recipient will collect it. It could work, as long as you are not in a rush to get the item.

photo credit: SergioMonsalve via photopin cc

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When I heard it at OuiShare for the first time, I couldn’t believe it: it turns out that at skill banks, people prefer to do favors instead of receiving them; at time banks people are more likely to offer their time instead of asking for it; and when dealing with local currencies citizens prefer to have others owe them credits than have a debt themselves. Not very rational, right?

It would be more rational to first ask for something (favors, time, money) and then decide if you would like to give. A prize without any effort? No doubt: go for it. But it turns out that reality and our own experiences tell a different story. It´s rather human to feel pride in having a skill that is useful to others as much as it is very human to experience satisfaction in lending something to someone or accumulating social credits in case they are needed at some point.

After doing all types of research and behavioral experiments, Yochai Benkler concluded in The Penguin and the Leviathan, that humans are distributed as follows: 30% always cooperate, another 30% will always do their own thing and – great news – for 40%, it depends. What does it depend on?

It depends on the context. If you are told that a group is very cooperative, you will act in a cooperative way. If you are told that you are surrounded by sharks, you will try not to look anyone in the eye. It depends, therefore, on what we think about ourselves. It depends largely on how our public and private spaces are designed as well as the systems we use to interact. It depends on the default configuration. Settings by default?

Many collaborative economy platforms help us express mutual support freely and reveal an unexpected side of the homo economicus. Maybe we are not the profit maximizers we are thought to be, and now that we know ourselves better, can start behaving as we truly are.

This article was originally published in Spanish in the magazine Yorokobu

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There’s been a few notable changes in the landscape of Collaborative Consumption recently. Whipcar (p2p carsharing), Liquid (formerly Spinlister, a bikesharing service), and Loosecubes (a coworking service) have all shut down. There have been various pivots, including Zaarly ( a “reverse craigslist”), Skillshare (a site where anyone can teach a class), Milk.ly (originally a TaskRabbit competitor), and ThredUP (originally p2p clothing sales). While there are various factors at play, (see an interview with Campbell McKellar, founder of Loosecubes) the truth remains that’s it’s just plain hard to build a successful p2p service. A marketplace must change behavior, achieve liquidity, and create a high transaction volume to build a sustainable business.

Behavior Change

All new products and services require some sort of change in behavior. For example, using Amazon requires you to click and type from your computer as opposed to walking to a bookstore to purchase a book. But in order to truly drive behavior change and convert people to a service, the experience must be an order of magnitude better than whatever existing solution people have. In Amazon’s case, it was the fact that one could never leave the house but have access to a huge inventory of books at a better price than your local store that really drove adoption.

For many of the early adopters in the sharing economy, the experience of a peer to peer interaction is significantly better due to their unique characteristics. They like meeting a new person, or the fact that they’re reducing their environmental footprint, and therefore are willing to use a new platform.

However, for the mainstream user, these issues aren’t often a factor in motivation. To get the mainstream, P2P services need to offer something much better than the current solution. New users must have way to make (a significant amount of) money where none existed before, a much cheaper alternative to a current product or service, or a much more convenient solution to an existing problem. The big names in the space fit at least one of these categories.

To convince the mainstream, P2P services need to offer something much better than the current solution.

The challenge is that it’s very difficult to create a situation in which the experience is an order of magnitude better for the mainstream. Making a few extra dollars just isn’t worth it for many people, especially if the P2P method is equally convenient or potentially even less convenient than how people are currently behaving. It’s even harder at the start, because new marketplaces lack…

Liquidity

Liquidity is the answer to the question “When I try to use a P2P service, can I find what I’m looking for?” For new two-sided services, it’s often no. The chance that someone in your geographical area has exactly what you want on the day/time you want it is just pretty slim if there are only 100 or 1000 users on a service. It’s known as the “double coincidence of wants”. Bo Fishback of Zaarly talks about how this was a problem for them in their original model here.

It’s possible to “hack” your way to liquidity with either a huge marketing budget, by focusing on single user utility, or by starting with a local or very targeted niche. If you don’t have a huge marketing budget (like every startup I can think of), your service has to be valuable to those first few users who sign up, so that they will continue to use it and even recruit more. If you decide to focus on a local niche too, you need some way of spreading beyond that locality. That’s an even harder challenge than picking something which will give your users a much better experience at scale.

On top of getting to liquidity, there’s an additional problem of competing with existing liquid services like eBay and Craigslist. Once a service reaches liquidity (most people showing up get what they want), it’s very hard to “beat” them. Your users aren’t likely to spend any effort on a new “risky” service when they know they can get exactly what they want somewhere else.

Transaction Volume

All of the services mentioned in the first paragraph happen to have some sort of venture funding. While some may debate the merits of this choice, the fact is that they all had plans to make a large amount of money.

Since most of the peer to peer services we’ve seen use a simple transaction fee as a way to make money, let’s do a little math (see more here). Let’s say you have 5 people on your team, and everyone makes $60,000 a year. That’s $300,000 a year you need to make, and since you only get to keep 10% of the value of transactions, there has to be $3 million going through your platform every year. Unless you’re dealing with high value assets (cars and houses), or very frequent transactions (shared transportation), it’s pretty tough to get to that number.

You need many more users than a company who makes $300 a year each off of 1,000 customers on a one time sale, for example. So while some marketplaces may see some traction and have a small core of users, they can’t return money to their investors unless they hit that “hockey-stick” growth.

So What?

I don’t believe that Collaborative Consumption is dead, but it’s not a walk in the park. You can’t just slap an “Airbnb for this” label on your company and expect to rule the world.

We’re definitely moving towards an era of access over ownership due to major steps forward in technology, but it will take time and dedication. So in short: learn from the successes and mistakes of others, focus on what will really get people to use collaborative consumption services, and build for the future.

Special thanks to Juho Makkonen from Sharetribe for putting some great resources together on sharing economy startups that have failed and how to create a lively p2p marketplace.

Picture courtesy of flickr user compujeramey

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The Wealth of the Commons, edited by veterans of the commons David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, is a revolutionary book full of constructive input for the growing sharing economy, including a diverse group of voices drawn from intellectuals and activists across the globe. Instead of attempting to provide formal definitions or grand plans, they ambitiously and artfully combine diverse viewpoints from people with similar sympathies, bringing together all sides together to plant new seeds for the growth of a democratic commons.

What is the “commons”?

What is the “Commons”? In a certain sense, it is defined against a social darwinism that emphasizes competition and zero sum games, the ugliness of contemporary capitalism and a statement that democracy in self-declared “democratic” lands is “largely a sham” as control is monopolized by a “closed oligopoly of elite insiders.” The commons, then, become a way of re-emphasizing community and democracy in the wake of hyper-individualization, a recognition that the “mechanisms and processes of representative democracy are no longer a credible vehicle for the change we need.” Instead, we, the people, can come together to transcend and remake the political and economic order.

Natural ecosystems used to solve real problems

The book continues as a series of essays on community building and collective transcendence, drawing frequently from the natural world, a stimulating essay by Andreas Weber on the economy of ecology, challenging the mainstream view of life as an endless process of optimization; a piece by Ugo Mattei on how ecosystems can be used as a model for both philosophical and legal thought, and a preview of Bollier’s forthcoming book on Green Governance. Editor Silke Helfrich also contrasts for-profit ways of thinking with the commons paradigm in a table that should be required reference for anyone in the collaborative or sharing space, illustrating the principles behind successful decentralized organization.

Diversity and Innovation

In some ways, given the diverse topics and large size of this book, it is best approached through careful consideration of individual essays. The essays, of which there are seventy two in total, are helpfully divided into five sections: on the commons in general, on capitalism and economics, on social innovation, on knowledge and information technology, and on the challenges of governance. One of the best ways to understand what is at stake here is to read the transcript of the spirited debate held between members of the International Commons Conference in 2010, which tackles the ideas of growth, abundance, and consumption of resources in the context of information technology, something that expresses both the diversity and the kindred spirit of their viewpoints.

The end of social darwinism?

Throughout the book is a dramatic sense that Darwinism, carried to its logical conclusions, brings us into destructive war of all against all, and that a commons capable of combatting against the excesses of for profit individualism must reach both forward and back. In the context of the commons, this means both utilizing  new technology to combine likeminded people with the goal of collaboration, and to re-emphasize communal values that have been undermined by the relentless emphasis on profit in modern society and the monopolization of democratic discourse by those who value profit first and foremost. The commons in this sense is like a tree; deep roots ensure that rapid growth remains stable and sustainable.

The commons grows and grows

The book ends with a series of beautiful stories illustrating how the commons movement is growing in strength and cohesion each year, something that certainly is felt by the many contributors to Ouishare and peer organizations like Shareable.net. Simply gathering such a diverse set of voices in the same place represents a small but significant step forward, as we observe global consciousness evolving to meet the environmental and social challenges of our day. A further evolution in the commons is certainly at hand. It is a hopeful and exciting future that awaits us.

Header image of book from www.wealthofthecommons.org

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As Techcrunch reports, Facebook just announced it was hiring the co-founders of Legit, a startup that has been developing an online trust and reputation framework for the sharing economy. Seeing that trust is crucial to the success of p2p marketplaces, Legit and several other startups aimed to build a “credit system for the 21st century” that ties together peer-to-peer marketplaces and fosters trust between users.

Since I did research on trust in p2p marketplaces myself and worked at Legit’s competitor TrustCloud, Facebook’s announcement did not so much surprise, but remind me of one of the main conclusions I had drawn from my research one year back: Facebook has the critical mass and the data to become a central trust and identity system for the web, overnight. It is only a matter of them deciding to do it. As Legit’s co-founders Jeremy Barton and Rob Boyle stated in an open letter on their blog about lessons learned from building their startup,

“Facebook is a core piece of infrastructure for many marketplaces as the source of your offline authenticity and reliability”

Over the past years, Facebook connect has established itself as a way for p2p platforms to verify their users’ identities and access additional information about their friends and interests with one click. With this system already in place, Facebook has a huge competitive advantage over any other company attempting to become the standard for identity and reputation on the Web.

There are even rumors that Facebook is considering launching a Craig’s list-like marketplace and may begin integrating sharing marketplaces such as Airbnb directly into its site, meaning that this scenario could become reality soon. The question is: do we want one company controlling our online identity and becoming the sole gatekeeper of our online reputation? Aren’t there alternatives? Let’s take a look at the status of other startups working on trust systems for the sharing economy.

Finding the right approach to building trust

I remember talking to Legit’s founder Barton for my thesis research one year ago. Inspired by Rachel Botsman’s Ted talk and passionate about empowering the collaborative consumption community, he described his team’s struggle in finding the right business model for their idea.

After several pivots from a consumer facing product to a cross-platform reputation system that allowed p2p marketplaces to share their data within the so-called “legit reputation group”, they finally decided to give up on solving the trust problem on their own. Why? One of the main challenges they name was convincing p2p marketplaces to integrate their system into their platform.

This taps into a discussion that has been going on for a while: should every marketplace build its own reputation system or “outsource” this task? While many marketplaces are building systems tailored to their specific needs (Taskrabbit offers detailed background checks, Lyft has its own screening system for drivers), advocates of using standalone trust systems argue that there are universal trust parameters that are consistent across different sharing verticals. Even though everyone agrees trust between strangers is an issue, they don’t know how to address it.

TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ on Flickr, CC

Legit is not the only startup that failed at building a standalone trust system. A considerable number of startups and projects with an array of different promising approaches to building trust pulled the plug after several months (or have been very quiet recently), among them Scaffold, Briiefly, Peertrust, Project Trust, Truly. Of this first wave of startups, TrustCloud is in fact the only company left.

Last fall a new wave of startups with interesting approaches to the topic emerged: Credport maps your social relationships, Fidbacks summarizes all your ratings in one place (without using social networks at all) and Virtrue offers enterprises and p2p marketplaces verifications for their users. Another innovation outside of the realm of the sharing economy are services offering personal data vaults, distributed systems that let you store and use your data all over the Web. But this space has not only caught the attention of startups, but large companies. La Poste, the French postal service, has launched a service called Identité Numérique that verifies people’s digital identity in real life:

“By associating itself with the collaborative economy movement, the La Poste Group aims to provide its customers and partners with access to this new economy”

says Anthony Deydier head of La Poste innovation marketing.

Will one of these establish itself? While many of these approaches seem promising, I feel like a key ingredient to making these systems catch on among a critical mass is still missing. But if I knew what that ingredient was, I would not be writing this article.

On and offline life, seamlessly connected

While the scale of transactions on p2p marketplaces today is still very small, the topic of online reputation is not. Our lives are being redefined through connectedness as technology permeates our lives. Our online footprints are growing and increasingly impacting our real life decisions: whether we get hired, get a loan or who we buy from (in the words of Om Malik, data darwinism is shaping our societies). The connections between our on and offline existences are becoming seamless – Google Glass is a great example of this.

I’m guessing that in a few years, we will no longer differentiate between on and offline interactions And that’s a game changer, because once this distinction disappears, our understanding of online identity and its relevance must change. It’s then (and already is) a discussion that affects everyone, not just the sharing economy.

Now is the time for us to take charge of how we want identity and privacy to look like in the 21st century. And let’s not opt for the easiest solution, but the best.

I don’t want Facebook and the handful of companies it partners with to be the sole gatekeeper of my online life – do you?

photo credit: FutUndBeidl via photopin cc

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The news raised a storm of controversy almost immediately. Press and pundits alike chimed in with their opinions about the implications for Yahoo, and the actual value of remote work in the modern workplace. Most of them saw this as a negative sign for Yahoo, indicating it was having trouble adapting to a networked, cloud-based reality which its own technologies helped create. And all that discussion is one of the best things to happen to the emerging informal economy, and to remote workers (outside of Yahoo) for years.

Managing Remote Workers

Remote work has always been a difficult concept for some managers to grasp. It challenges their leadership skills and flies in the face of traditional concepts of corporate team building. One of the main reasons cited by Mayer for discontinuing the practice at Yahoo was that managers were losing track of their workers, and productivity was suffering. It’s not an easy thing for a traditional, hierarchical organization to accommodate the degree of flexibility that remote work provides.

But the key issue, even according to Yahoo, was not the productivity of remote workers. Remote work is challenging to manage within a traditional organization. The failure at Yahoo was not a decline in worker productivity, but a failure to train management in effective communication strategies for remote teams. According to the company’s own letter to employees announcing the change, “to become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side.”

The Positive and Negative Issues of Remote Work

Studies such as a 2011 World at Work report continue to come out showing that remote work is a net positive for most companies that adopt it. Remote work provides so many benefits for a company that it’s understandable that many of them try to incorporate it:

●      it is often seen as a benefit for attracting and retaining key talent
●      it frees up expensive physical resources in high-rent cities
●      it increases a worker’s productive hours without commute time
●      it encourages a stronger focus on documentation and communication
●      it allows work to be distributed around the world seamlessly

 But it’s not all positive. With any change in a social institution as significant as the common workplace, there will always be repercussions.

As the informal economy encroaches on the formal one, there are people who will find their familiar office-based roles put at risk.

The practice is so beneficial to the organization, it risks being vilified as a challenge to the traditional office worker, afraid of seeing his position “outsourced” to another country.

Another 2011 report out of Cornell points out that there is a potential negative side to remote work for many workers who don’t understand the implications of working outside of a structured environment. This is largely due to the compromises a worker has to make in order to adapt to the necessary lifestyle changes.

Among the key complaints that full-time remote workers have are the lack of social contact with colleagues, the sense that the work and home are not adequately separated, and the endless nature of a work day that is not constrained by the traditional office hours.

New Responsibilities

Despite the benefits to companies, remote work is still not the way most managers have been trained to develop and oversee their teams. The added responsibilities put on the shoulders of the manager are significant. A remote workforce requires a manager to put positive effort into developing new communication strategies, and doing the type of supervision and collaboration that most managers have been trained to deal with in a face-to-face environment.

At the same time, workers need a new set of skills to cope with the issues that can come up around remote work. Often time management can be difficult for someone used to the conventions of going to an office to work and coming home to rest. Remote workers also need to be adept users of new networked productivity tools, and able to document and report on what they have accomplished effectively to keep their manager, clients and customers aware of their progress.

Because of these new responsibilities, it is critical for a company considering remote work policies to develop the leadership skills of managers and the work habits of employees, in a way that supports corporate team building across remote work teams.

Ironically, Yahoo was one of the pioneers in building collaborative online productivity tools, although their current suite is less rich than some, such as Google Documents, Zoho Office, Basecamp from 37 Signals, and Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM Tools, to list only a few. With so many tools and options, and such universal access to them available online around the world, there has never been a better time to work remotely and productively.

Flexibility and the Modern Economy

The modern economy is becoming more hostile to rigidity. A world in which technology changes as rapidly as it does today is not structured to support a centralized, hierarchical approach to management.

The remote worker is already on the cutting edge of this trend, operating in a world of shared documents and networked communications tools designed to support collaboration and cooperation regardless of physical proximity.

There is a new skill set needed to work remotely, and the workers who adapt fastest will be in the best position to take advantage of this shift.

It’s the ability to manage and develop a team in this environment which will differentiate the flexible, agile organization from the rigid, hierarchical one. And ultimately, the more agile and responsive a company can be to the changing environment, the better able it will be to adapt and grow as times change.

Positive Attention to the Issues

So Marissa Mayer’s decision, and the response it generated, is a very good sign for remote workers around the world.

For people living and working in the informal economy, the ability to take their jobs with them as they travel and pursue their personal and professional growth is an essential component of their lifestyles.

Working with employers, clients, and customers who are able to take advantage of that agility provides remote workers with the tools and the resources they need to succeed, while producing valuable benefits for the economy as a whole.

In the early days of computing, there was a myth that eventually we would see a paperless office. In practice, that hasn’t come to pass, and the myth of the universal remote workforce is probably just as impractical for the moment. But with proper training, and with the evolution of new tools to take advantage of distributed human resources, the advantages of integrating remote workers into both new and existing companies will certainly continue to push the trend forward.

photo credit: splorp via photopin cc

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