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under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust

There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.

giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them

It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.

Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else

If you pay me for it, it must be work

It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)

interesting examples of an effect called crowding

Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.

A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.

Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)

Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.

The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one

"The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.

External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling

External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive

In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination

cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)

this is labor, this is work, just do it.

When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun

So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.

Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.

You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars

When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued

you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy

Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.

You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.

No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money

too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.

Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve

They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them

If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.

People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy

Donate.

Thank-you gifts

Pay bounties

everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place

continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life

Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.

consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons

infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’

democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons

which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.

civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.

democratically decide

the ‘common good’ of society as a whole

The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.

Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.

true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.

Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.

Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.

designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders

mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.

surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners

ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.

because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .

A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.

mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract

Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how

Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.

Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations

once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth

People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.

“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”

It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.

From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.

a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together

The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”

And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.

Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs

“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”

As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson

The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 

His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”

Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality

Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.

Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time

It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network

The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.

all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure

A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.

For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete

For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.

Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start

Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality

Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows

A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.

In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.

But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same.

The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.

capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence

1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential 2) The monetization of such value is linear

What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.

more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field

“the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”

This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy

crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners

The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.

We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.

Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.

The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “

increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm

there is no more outside.

one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means

Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks

failure of artificial abundance

failure of artificial scarcity