Skip to main content

Home/ QN2019/ Group items tagged sharing economy

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Aurialie Jublin

Let's make private data into a public good - MIT Technology Review - 0 views

  • Why is this a problem? Well, maybe because these giants are making huge profits from technologies originally created with taxpayer money. Google’s algorithm was developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, and the internet came from DARPA funding. The same is true for touch-screen displays, GPS, and Siri. From this the tech giants have created de facto monopolies while evading the type of regulation that would rein in monopolies in any other industry. And their business model is built on taking advantage of the habits and private information of the taxpayers who funded the technologies in the first place.
  • Apologists like to portray the internet giants as forces for good. They praise the sharing economy in which digital platforms empower people via free access to everything from social networking to GPS navigation to health monitoring. But Google doesn’t give us anything for free. It’s really the other way around—we’re handing over to Google exactly what it needs. When you use Google’s services it might feel as if you’re getting something for nothing, but you’re not even the customer—you’re the product. The bulk of Google’s profits come from selling advertising space and users’ data to firms. Facebook’s and Google’s business models are built on the commodification of personal data, transforming our friendships, interests, beliefs, and preferences into sellable propositions.
  • And because of network effects, the new gig economy doesn’t spread the wealth so much as concentrate it even more in the hands of a few firms (see Rein in the Data Barons). Like the internal-combustion engine or the QWERTY keyboard, a company that establishes itself as the leader in a market achieves a dominance that becomes self-perpetuating almost automatically.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The low tax rates that technology companies are typically paying on these large rewards are also perverse, given that their success was built on technologies funded and developed by high-risk public investments: if anything, companies that owe their fortunes to taxpayer-funded investment should be repaying the taxpayer, not seeking tax breaks.
  • We should ask how the value of these companies has been created, how that value has been measured, and who benefits from it. If we go by national accounts, the contribution of internet platforms to national income (as measured, for example, by GDP) is represented by the advertisement-related services they sell. But does that make sense? It’s not clear that ads really contribute to the national product, let alone to social well-being—which should be the aim of economic activity. Measuring the value of a company like Google or Facebook by the number of ads it sells is consistent with standard neoclassical economics, which interprets any market-based transaction as signaling the production of some kind of output—in other words, no matter what the thing is, as long as a price is received, it must be valuable. But in the case of these internet companies, that’s misleading: if online giants contribute to social well-being, they do it through the services they provide to users, not through the accompanying advertisements.
  • This way we have of ascribing value to what the internet giants produce is completely confusing, and it’s generating a paradoxical result: their advertising activities are counted as a net contribution to national income, while the more valuable services they provide to users are not.
  • Let’s not forget that a large part of the technology and necessary data was created by all of us, and should thus belong to all of us. The underlying infrastructure that all these companies rely on was created collectively (via the tax dollars that built the internet), and it also feeds off network effects that are produced collectively. There is indeed no reason why the public’s data should not be owned by a public repository that sells the data to the tech giants, rather than vice versa. But the key issue here is not just sending a portion of the profits from data back to citizens but also allowing them to shape the digital economy in a way that satisfies public needs. Using big data and AI to improve the services provided by the welfare state—from health care to social housing—is just one example.
  • Only by thinking about digital platforms as collective creations can we construct a new model that offers something of real value, driven by public purpose. We’re never far from a media story that stirs up a debate about the need to regulate tech companies, which creates a sense that there’s a war between their interests and those of national governments. We need to move beyond this narrative. The digital economy must be subject to the needs of all sides; it’s a partnership of equals where regulators should have the confidence to be market shapers and value creators. 
  •  
    "The internet giants depend on our data. A new relationship between us and them could deliver real value to society."
Aurialie Jublin

Uber's request to grant equity to its contractors feels like a trap | Salon.com - 0 views

  • The line between contractor and employee is not as blurry as it seems — it’s just often unenforced. A 2018 California State Superior Court ruling decreed that a company can only hire contractors if they “[perform] work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business.” That seems like a blow to contractor-dependent companies like Uber and Lyft: if they consider themselves essentially taxi companies, then their contract-worker drivers are certainly not “outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business,” much as Lyft and Uber brass would prefer to believe otherwise.
  • Yet little has changed in California since that Superior Court ruling: the gig-ification of the economy continues apace, particularly among Silicon Valley’s many startups. Many, self included, have called for contract-heavy companies Uber and Lyft to convert to worker cooperatives or for alternative worker cooperatives to form in their wake.
  • Now, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that some tech companies, namely AirBnb and Uber, want to grant shares to their contractors. Uber issued a comment to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which you can read here, asking them for permission. The reason for the SEC request is that it turns out giving equity to contractors is not quite legal yet.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The cynical view on the decision to offer equity to gig economy contractors is that it is, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg, akin to reformism over revolution — meaning, by enacting a minor policy reform in offering equity to contractors, companies like Uber and Airbnb don’t fundamentally solve the innate inequalities and exploitations that their business models generate. Rather, they merely stave off future upsets to their business model, particularly the looming prospect faced by Uber and Lyft that they might literally run out of potential drivers as the supply of interested workers decreases in a labor market with historically low unemployment.
  • The bottom line is, stock options for contractors might seem like a convenient short-term step to remunerating contract workers better, something that we’re all in favor of. But such an act doesn’t overcome the fundamental structural problems with contract labor, nor the small exploitations suffered by contract workers who have no guaranteed pay, benefits or job security. As such, it comes off as more of a recruiting and PR tactic than genuine Silicon Valley reform.
  •  
    "Silicon Valley wants to give equity to contractors. Is this genuine income redistribution or a recruiting trick?"
Aurialie Jublin

Charter for Building a Data Commons for a Free, Fair and Sustainable Future | CommonsBlog - 0 views

  • 1. **Reflect on your intentions together** Discuss the core of your project again and again. Everybody involved should always feel in resonance with the direction in which it’s heading.
  • 2. **Make your community thrive** For the project to be successful, a reliable community is more important than anything else. Care for those who might support you when you need them most.
  • 3. **Separate commons and commerce** Mapping for the commons is different from producing services or products to compete on the map-market.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • 4. **Design for interoperability** Think of your map as a node in a network of many maps. Talk with other contributors to the Data Commons to find out if you can use the same data model, licence and approach to mapping.
  • 5. **Care for a living vocabulary** Vocabularies as entry points to complex social worlds are always incomplete. Learn from other mappers‘ vocabularies. Make sure your vocabulary can be adjusted. Make it explicit and publish it openly, so that others can learn from it too.
  • 6. **Document transparently** Sharing your working process, learnings and failures allow others to replicate, join and contribute. Don’t leave documentation for after. Do it often and make it understandable. Use technologies designed for open cooperation.
  • 7. **Crowdsource what you can** Sustain your project whenever possible with money, time, knowledge, storing space, hardware or monitoring from your community or public support. Stay independent!
  • 8. **Use FLOSS tools** It gives you the freedom to further develop your own project and software according to your needs. And it enables you to contribute to the development of these tools.
  • 9. **Build upon the open web platform** Open web standards ensure your map, its data and associated applications cannot be enclosed and are prepared for later remixing and integration with other sources.
  • 10. **Own your data** In the short run, it seems to be a nightmare to refrain from importing or copying what you are not legally entitled to. In the long run, it is the only way to prevent you from being sued or your data being enclosed. Ban Google.
  • 11. **Protect your data** To own your data is important, but not enough. Make sure nobody dumps your data back into the world of marketization and enclosures. Use appropriate licenses to protect your collective work!
  • 12. **Archive your project** When it doesn’t work anymore for you, others still might want to build on it in the future.
  •  
    "Nations-States rely on constitutions. Common(er)s find common ground through a Charter. If you are part of the co-creation of a powerful Data Commons - through mapping, coding, data modelling or other activities - this is for you. It is an fundamental building-block for online and offline cooperation. The following is version 0.6 of what has been called in previously: Charter for Building a Data Commons of Alternative Economies or Mapping for the Commons Manifesto. We, the participants of the Intermapping meeting (March 2017 in Florence), hope to hereby publish a version that provides orientation to the countless mapping processes for a free, fair and sustainable world. We invite you to work together on the practical issues: how to implement the principles outlined in the Charter (see below)? Let's federate our efforts to make the Commons thrive!"
Aurialie Jublin

korii.: Vinted, quand l'économie circulaire ne tourne pas rond - 0 views

  •  
    Présentée comme un moyen de vider son armoire en donnant une seconde vie aux vêtements, la friperie en ligne encourage surtout à acheter toujours plus.
Aurialie Jublin

The Very First Oakland Co-op DiscoTech - Danny Spitzberg - Medium - 0 views

  • Technology isn’t necessary for bars or farms to become better co-ops, but it can help.Two coalitions that embrace co-design — civic tech and online organizing — can offer lessons on how to build better tech.At the same time, co-op theory and history offer a model of how to own, control, and share the value generated by the tech we build.
  • While each area has its emphasis, each can learn from the other, too:Civic tech is a coalition for better citizenship, trying to achieve citizen engagement. An example is southbendvoices.com, an automated call-in system. Yet tweeting the city to shut off sprinklers after the rain is a far cry from building better neighborhoods. What could it add? Economic solidarity.Online organizing is a digital approach to social change, trying to achieve community power. An example is 18millionrising.org, a group running rapid-response campaigns for racial justice. What’s missing? Platforms that support lasting effort with multiple allies.The co-op movement is about democracy in the workplace, trying to achieve real ownership, control, and value for the people doing the labor. An example is the Arizmendi Association, an umbrella group supporting six worker-owned bakeries. It’s a model that only the Enspiral network has replicated in New Zealand. What potential remains untapped here? Widespread relevance.How might all three of these areas become better, together?
  • There are co-ops, and then there is cooperation. Shane from CCA asked “what counts as a co-op?” and Willow Brugh from Aspiration Tech described a multi-stakeholder project in Africa that supports self-determining small businesses. I mentioned how Enspiral exemplifies the first co-op principle of open and voluntary membership better than most legally-recognized co-ops with a quarterly auto-email to their 30 member organizations that simply asks, “Do you still feel like a member?”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • There are parallel worlds we can learn from, if we take care not to reproduce extractive practices. Developer and counselor Kermit Goodwin suggested that the open source community might be a place to learn more, and Noah Thorp of CoMakery cautioned that while developers might play better, the open source software economy is “broken” and dominated by corporate interests — most of the people making a livelihood through open source software do so through extractive enterprises (think, Microsoft).
  • And then there is the agitation and education that leads to organizing. After Evangeline asked “Why do people stop trying?” and how we can make co-ops familiar to more people, Molly McLeod brought up relatively passive directories like cultivate.coop and showed us Co-opoly, a boardgame about starting worker-owned businesses and having all of the poignant conversations that go along with it. Jackie Mahendra from CEL said her first serious role was working with a co-op house, and then others agreed co-ops can stay relevant if they provide services more widely — housing, education, health care, consumer finance, and more. Building viable co-op platforms is exactly what the creators of Platform Cooperativism are organizing around.
  •  
    "Evangeline asked why people get involved in co-ops, and then drop it. "Why do people stop trying?" For half of the 30 people at The Very First Oakland Co-op DiscoTech, it was a tough question - they had little exposure to co-ops in the first place."
Aurialie Jublin

Open source sustainability | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • Engineers around the world pour their sweat and frankly, their hearts into these passion projects that undergird all software in the modern internet economy. In exchange, they ask for nothing in return except for recognition and help in keeping their projects alive and improving them. It’s an incredible movement of decentralized voluntarism and represents humanity at its best.
  • Two years later, a new crop of entrepreneurs, open source maintainers, and organizations have taken Eghbal up on that challenge, developing solutions that maintain the volunteer spirit at the heart of open source while inventing new economic models to make the work sustainable. All are early, and their long-term effects on the output and quality of open source are unknown. But each solution offers an avenue that could radically change the way we think of a career in open source in the future.
  • Eghbal’s report two years ago summarized the vast issues facing open source maintainers, challenges that have remained essentially unchanged in the interim. It’s a quintessential example of the “tragedy of the commons.” As Eghbal wrote at the time, “Fundamentally, digital infrastructure has a free rider problem. Resources are offered for free, and everybody (whether individual developer or large software company) uses them, so nobody is incentivized to contribute back, figuring that somebody else will step in.” That has led to a brittle ecosystem, just as open source software reached the zenith of its influence.
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • Eghbal pointed to OpenSSL as an example, a library that powers a majority of encrypted communications on the web. Following the release of the Heartbleed security bug, people were surprised to learn that the OpenSSL project was the work of a very small team of individuals, with only one of them working on it full-time (and at a very limited salary compared to industry norms).
  • No one wants open source to disappear, or for maintainers to burnout. Yet, there is a strong cultural force against commercial interests in the community. Money is corrupting, and dampens the voluntary spirit of open source efforts. More pragmatically, there are vast logistical challenges with managing money on globally distributed volunteer teams that can make paying for work logistically challenging.
  • Kyle Mitchell, a lawyer by trade and founder of License Zero, says that there is an assumption that “Open source will continue to fall from the sky like manna from heaven and that the people behind it can be abstracted away.” He concludes: “It is just really wrong.”That view was echoed by Henry Zhu, who is the maintainer of the popular JavaScript compiler Babel. “We trust startups with millions of VC money and encourage a culture of ‘failing fast,’ yet somehow the idea of giving to volunteers who may have showed years of dedication is undesirable?” he said.
  • Mitchell believes that one of the most important challenges is just getting comfortable talking about money. “Money feels dirty until it doesn’t,” he said. “I would like to see more money responsibility in the community.” One challenge he notes is that “learning to be a great maintainer doesn’t teach you how to be a great open source contractor or consultant.” GitHub works great as a code repository service, but ultimately doesn’t teach maintainers the economics of their work.
  • Perhaps the greatest debate in sustaining open source is deciding who or what to target: the individual contributors — who often move between multiple projects — or a particular library itself.
  • Patreon is a crowdsourced subscription platform, perhaps best known for the creatives it hosts. These days though, it is also increasingly being used by notable open source contributors as a way to connect with fans and sustain their work. Aboukhadijeh launched his page after seeing others doing it. “A bunch of people were starting up Patreons, which was kind of a meme in my JavaScript circles,” he said. His Patreon page today has 72 contributors providing him with $2,874 in funding per month ($34,488 annually).
  • That may seem a bit paltry, but he explained to me that he also supplements his Patreon with funding from organizations as diverse as Brave (an adblocking browser with a utility token model) to PopChest (a decentralized video sharing platform). That nets him a couple of more thousands of dollars per month.
  • Aboukhadijeh said that Twitter played an outsized role in building out his revenue stream. “Twitter is the most important on where the developers talk about stuff and where conversations happen…,” he said. “The people who have been successful on Patreon in the same cohort [as me] who tweet a lot did really well.”
  • For those who hit it big, the revenues can be outsized. Evan You, who created the popular JavaScript frontend library Vue.js, has reached $15,206 in monthly earnings ($182,472 a year) from 231 patrons. The number of patrons has grown consistently since starting his Patreon in March 2016 according to Graphtreon, although earnings have gone up and down over time.
  • While Patreon is one direct approach for generating revenues from users, another one is to offer dual licenses, one free and one commercial. That’s the model of License Zero, which Kyle Mitchell propsosed last year. He explained to me that “License Zero is the answer to a really simple question with no simple answers: how do we make open source business models open to individuals?”
  • License Zero is a permissive license based on the two-clause BSD license, but adds terms requiring commercial users to pay for a commercial license after 90 days, allowing companies to try a project before purchasing it. If other licenses aren’t available for purchase (say, because a maintainer is no longer involved), then the language is no longer enforceable and the software is offered as fully open source. The idea is that other open source users can always use the software for free, but for-profit uses would require a payment.
  • Mitchell believes that this is the right approach for individuals looking to sustain their efforts in open source. “The most important thing is the time budget – a lot of open source companies or people who have an open source project get their money from services,” he said. The problem is that services are exclusive to a company, and take time away from making a project as good as it can be. “When moneymaking time is not time spent on open source, then it competes with open source,” he said.
  • Supporting individuals makes a lot of sense, but often companies want to support the specific projects and ecosystems that underpin their software. Doing so can be next to impossible. There are complicated logistics required in order for companies to fund open source, such as actually having an organization to send money to (and for many, to convince the IRS that the organization is actually a non-profit). Tidelift and Open Collective are two different ways to open up those channels.
  • Fischer and his team wanted to create a platform that would allow open source ecosystems to sustain themselves. “We felt frustrated at some level that while open source has taken over a huge portion of software, a lot of the creators of open source have not been able to capture a lot of the value they are creating,” he explained.Tidelift is designed to offer assurances “around areas like security, licensing, and maintenance of software,” Fischer explained. The idea has its genesis in Red Hat, which commercialized Linux. The idea is that companies are willing to pay for open source when they can receive guarantees around issues like critical vulnerabilities and long-term support. In addition, Tidelift handles the mundane tasks of setting up open source for commercialization such as handling licensing issues.
  • Tidelift initially launched in the JavaScript ecosystem around React, Angular, and Vue.js, but will expand to more communities over time. The company has raised $15 million in venture capital from General Catalyst and Foundry Group, plus former Red Hat chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik.
  • Fischer hopes that the company can change the economics for open source contributors. He wants the community to move from a model of “get by and survive” with a “subsistence level of earnings” and instead, help maintainers of great software “win big and be financially rewarded for that in a significant way.”
  • Where Tidelift is focused on commercialization and software guarantees, Open Collective wants to open source the monetization of open source itself.Open Collective is a platform that provides tools to “collectives” to receive money while also offering mechanisms to allow the members of those collectives to spend their money in a democratic and transparent way.
  • Xavier Damman, founder president of Open Collective, believes that this radical transparency could reshape how the economics of open source are considered by its participants. Damman likens Open Collective to the “View Source” feature of a web browser that allows users to read a website’s code. “Our goal as a platform is to be as transparent as possible,” he said.
  • Open Collective was launched in late 2015, and since then has become home to 647 open source projects. So far, Webpack, the popular JavaScript build tool, has generated the most revenue, currently sitting at $317,188 a year. One major objective of the organization is to encourage more for-profit companies to commit dollars to open source. Open Collective places the logos of major donors on each collective page, giving them visible credit for their commitment to open source.
  • Damman’s ultimate dream is to change the notion of ownership itself. We can move from “Competition to collaboration, but also ownership to commons,” he envisioned.
  • It’s unfortunately very early days for open source sustainability. While Patreon, License Zero, Tidelift, and Open Collective are different approaches to providing the infrastructure for sustainability, ultimately someone has to pay to make all that infrastructure useful. There are only a handful of Patreons that could substitute for an engineer’s day job, and only two collectives by my count on Open Collective that could support even a single maintainer full time. License Zero and Tidelift are too new to know how they will perform yet.
  • The change though can happen through all of us who work on code — every software engineer and product manager. If you work at a for-profit company, take the lead in finding a way to support the code that allows you to do your job so efficiently. The decentralization and volunteer spirit of the open source community needs exactly the same kind of decentralized spirit in every financial contributor. Sustainability is each of our jobs, every day. If we all do our part, we can help to sustain one of the great intellectual movements humanity has ever created, and end the oxymoron of open source sustainability forever.
  •  
    "Open source maintainers are exhausted and rarely paid. A new generation wants to change the economics."
1 - 6 of 6
Showing 20 items per page