by Ana Jamborcic We are a team of developers that helped to build some of the Bernie Sanders campaign tech and want to extend this and make it available to all activists. We need to have an org structure that isn’t dependent on VCs or grants for political reasons, and one that also fosters innovation […]
Originally published by America. In the post-election coming-out party for fake news, people seem more willing than usual to pay for the real thing. Subscriptions and donations to old-fashioned journalism have spiked since the election, benefiting outlets like Pro Publica, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. While it may be […]
by Six Slberman Originally published at wtf.tw This talk is loosely based on a paper that was published in the “design fictions” track of the proceedings of the 2016 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Supporting Group Work (“GROUP”), in Sanibel Island, Florida, USA. The paper is titled “Reading Elinor Ostrom in Silicon Valley: […]
Last night, at the Denver release event for Ours to Hack and to Own, an attendee asked what the biggest challenge is for platform cooperativism right now. I was tempted to say what most people in the movement would say, I suspect: financing. But I couldn’t. A few minutes earlier I’d been speaking with a […]
by Dr Rory Ridley-Duff, Sheffield Business School The recent Guardian article (“Here’s my plan to save Twitter: let’s buy it”, 29th Sept) by Nathan Schneider argues for the transformation of Twitter into a platform cooperative. It has caught the imagination of supporters because 2,000 of them have signed a Change.org campaign to “Free Twitter from […]
by Thomas Euler also published at Medium.com About two weeks ago I came across a group which was just forming at the internet’s edges. It’s mission statement: To acquire Twitter and turn it into a co-op that’s owned, in parts, by users. The group’s initial spark was this Guardian article by Nathan Schneider, a prominent […]
The following may be out of date. See the latest updates here. Twitter is up for sale. Big companies are circling around looking to buy. But what about us, Twitter users? This proposal to turn one of the world’s most important platform utilities into a platform co-op has started spreading from a mere idea to […]
The following article (with a few differences) was published in The Sociological Review 66, no. 2 (March 2018). Updated 2018.07.04. The disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the […]
by Mitar Milutinovic We live in times of a hidden war between “one person, one vote” and “one dollar, one vote” ideologies. The reason why it is hidden is because we use the same terms for both: democracy, voting, consensus, etc. We govern our governments each having one vote, but in our companies shareholders commonly […]
Capitalism loves a good crisis. It produces crises plentifully; it takes advantage of them gleefully. A crisis is an opportunity to throw pesky rules out the window—like workers’ rights or environmental responsibility—and carry out some brutal structural adjustment for the sake of capital. Can the co-op movement take advantage of crisis, too? Often, it has. […]