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There’s more than Olympics and Elections going on in the coming months. 2012 has been named International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations in recognition of the fact that more than 800 million people around the world belong to one of these economic networks. Coops flourish in all sectors of modern society proving that sharing is a practical economic model. They represent a commons-based alternative to both the private market and state controlled enterprises.

Four in ten Canadians are coop members (70 percent in the province of Quebec). In the U.S. 25 percent of the population belongs to at least one coop ranging from credit unions to food coops to major firms like REI and Land O’ Lakes dairy, according to the International Co-Operative Alliance In Belgium, coops account for 20 percent of pharmacies: in Brazil, 37 percent of all agricultural production is from coops; in Singapore, coops account for 55 percent of supermarket purchases; in Bolivia, one credit union handles 25 percent of all savings; in Korea and Japan, 90 percent of farmers belong to coops; in Kenya, coops account for 45 percent of the GDP; in Finland, 34 percent of forestry products, 74 percent of meat and 96 percent of dairy products come from coops.

Around the world, coops provide 100 million jobs, 20 percent more than multinational companies. But what’s most remarkable is how little attention they receive in business coverage or anywhere else. That’s why I am glad that commons scholar and activist David Bollier highlights the work of Gar Alperovitz, an American champion for democratizing capital, on his blog Bollier.org— Jay Walljasper

 

 

 

One of the most eloquent advocates for socially friendly forms of capital ownership – the French call it the “social economy” – is Gar Alperovitz, a historian and political economist at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative. Alperovitz’s 2005 book, America Beyond Capitalism, was recently re-issued, presumably because it speaks to the political moment. How can we make economic progress when banks and large corporations are simply looking out for themselves? How can we reduce wealth inequality when government is captured by corporations and the affluent?

Alperovitz showcases the history and great potential of co-ops, worker-owned companies, and urban land trusts. He notes the constructive role that is played by municipal utilities, state-owned banks and state-chartered trusts such as the Alaska Permanent Fund. There are also dozens of cases in which states use their investment dollars to help communities, use government procurement to help worker-owned businesses, and provide venture capital to startups.

These alternatives to traditional capitalist models are actually flourishing, Alperovitz notes: “We may be moving toward a hybrid system, something different from both traditional capitalism and socialism, without anyone even noticing. Some 130 million Americans, for example, now participate in the ownership of co-op businesses and credit unions. More than 13 million Americans have become worker-owners of more than 11,000 employee-owned companies, six million more than belong to private-sector unions.”

The great virtue of Alperovtiz’s hybrid “wealth building” models is that they “challenge dominant ideologies which hold that private corporate enterprise offers the only possible way forward; and they help open new ways of conceptualizing practical approaches to meaningful larger scale democratization.”

As a theoretical approach, Alperovtiz focuses on the democratization of wealth; the mobilization of communities, especially at the local level; the decentralization of power; and democratic planning in support of community and long-term ecological and economic goals.

Yet theory is not used here as an ideology or as a rhetorical posture. It is a way of describing projects that work. That is what makes so many of the examples in this book so appealing: they work. Chapter 7 surveys worker-owned firms as viable alternatives to footloose corporations. Chapter 8 describes “enterprising cities” that use their land, infrastructure and other resources to generate money for public purposes. Other chapters deal with local democratization and larger-scale “public trusts.”

Alperovitz has focused a lot of his energies on Cleveland, where there are a variety of worker-owned businesses. Perhaps the most notable is the Evergreen Coop, which consists of a “green” institutional laundry, a solar-panel installation coop and hydroponic agriculture businesses. The details of these and other stories add up to a refreshing approach to economic and community development.

Alperovitz writes:

“Almost half the states manage venture capital efforts, taking partial ownership in new businesses. Calpers, California’s public pension authority, helps finance local development projects; in Alaska, state oil revenues provide each resident with dividends from public investment strategies as a matter of right; in Alabama, public pension investing has long focused on state economic development….

“In Indiana, the Republican state treasurer, Richard Mourdock, is using state deposits to lower interest costs to employee-owned companies, a precedent others states could easily follow. Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, is developing legislation to support worker-owned strategies like that of Cleveland in other cities. And several policy analysts have proposed expanding existing government “set aside” procurement programs for small businesses to include co-ops and other democratized enterprises.

“If such cooperative efforts continue to increase in number, scale and sophistication, they may suggest the outlines, however tentative, of something very different from both traditional, corporate-dominated capitalism and traditional socialism.”

In a recent New York Times oped piece, Alperovitz noted that “this year some 14 states began to consider legislation to create public banks similar to the longstanding Bank of North Dakota; 15 more began to consider some form of single-payer or public-option health care plan.”

So long as the national debate is locked into the old categories of “capitalism” vs. “socialism” — as if they were the only choices, and as if each were a monolithic creature — we will be stuck in a ditch, unable to bring about any systemic change. But if we can begin to see how a diverse array of community-based business models are succeeding, we may just glimpse a productive path forward.

David Bollier, the founding editor of On The Commons, thinks and writes about the commons at Bollier.org , where this post originally appeared under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Bollier’s commons activism is focused on The Commons Law Project and The Commons Strategy Group

 

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Crowdsourcing is a multifaceted creature, one that can put the power of automation and the flexibility of distributed work into the backbone of your start-up. Here are five simple ways you can use crowdsourcing accelerate your startup:

1. Raise Some Moola with Equity, Debt, Donation or Pre-sales Based Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a new way to raise money online that is gaining popularity. Through an online open call, along with a proper fundraising campaign, your start-up can finance anything from a new product to the creation of the start-up itself.

Platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Rockethub have helped launch donation-based platforms into the limelight. On these platforms, you can pre-sell a product that doesn't yet exist, or just ask people for money who want to see you do something, like write a children's book.

Currently illegal in the U.S., but perfectly legal in parts of Europe, equity-based crowdfunding is where people buy an ownership stake in your business. This means that for as little as 20 Euros, the average Joe could become an investor in your company. How cool would that be?! But if you take this route, make sure you can handle the overhead that comes with managing a potentially large group of investors. Check out Symbid, one of the leaders in this space.

There are two ways to legally crowdfund your for-profit startup in the U.S. The first is to do a debt raise using social lending sites like LendingClub or Prosper. Downside: this creates a loan that you have to start paying back immediately and that may hold you personally liable for the loan if the business fails (check the terms). The second is to simply ask for a donation and offer no premiums. Offering premiums puts you within the legal definition of offering a security for sale. 

Another possibility for the more risk tolerant is to pre-sell a yet to be developed product. This lies in a legal gray area in the U.S., but is popular on Kickstarter. Whatever the case, be sure to crowdfund your startup according to the applicable laws in your area and also see Shareable's excellent article on crowdfunding and the law.

One of the myriad Kickstarter projects seeking funding. Photo credit: Inha Leex Hale. Used under Creative Commons license.

2. Generate Ideas

Sites like Idea Offer and Jig can give start-ups a great place to go when they are stuck for ideas. The premise here is that there are dozens of great sites to go and ask both open-ended and specific questions to get great, human feedback.

3. Get Your Name & Your Logo

Need a new name for your company or product? Try sites like Naming Force where people compete for a small cash prize to find the ideal name for you once you describe what you need. Need a logo? If you are a nonproit, you can request one for free from Sparked, if not, get it from a contest site like Design Crowd or 99Designs for a great price.

Some of the Maker Faire Africa logo entries from the logo contest at 99designs.com. Photo credit: Erik Hersman. Used under Creative Commons license.

4. Speed Up Your Tasks/ Relieve Your Workflow 

Did you just spend all day looking up e-mail addresses for all of the hardware stores in Nebraska to send your new plunger invention ad copy to? Well, you didn’t have to do that. Did you have a virtual assistant do it for $30? You didn’t have to do that, either. Microtasking sites like Clickworker let you hire microworkers for pennies per task. This means, if you can effectively break-up a task like the aforementioned Nebraska search, you could be finished within two hours or less than $10. Also consider TaskRabbit where you can hire someone nearby to do a task for you, like buy office supplies or deliver a prototype.

5. Test Your Site Before Launching

Why wait for your website to have users to test it? Just pay the crowd to use your new system and gain some great insight. Use sites like Member Mob and get a crash course by watching 100 people use your site as members and users. Or look for bugs with sites like Utest or Usertesting.

6. BONUS: Get Users Before You Go Live With LaunchRock.

These are just six ready-made crowdsourcing solutions for you to consider to accelerate your start-up. To take it to the next level, learn what crowdsourcing is all about and consider incorporating it into your business model.

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We are at a key turning moment in history. The actions that we will soon decide to take will be determined by the beliefs we hold. At a time like this, holding the wrong set of beliefs can destroy your wealth, sap your joy, and even prove to be life-shortening.

Knowing the 'right' sets of beliefs to hold is never easy, but it is especially difficult at large turning points because, by definition, most people are holding onto old beliefs. Running against the crowd is difficult for everyone and impossible for many.  read more »

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We’ve all been there. One minute you’re zipping around online, taking virtual tours, video conferencing, checking next week’s weather, and then it happens; you land on a government site and you’re thrown back to the web’s early days with layer after layer of tail-chasing information, PDF-laden data, a help page that directs to an automated phone menu and a labyrinthine set of instructions on how to proceed.

Code for America is on a mission to change this. Staunch proponent of gov 2.0, the non-profit organization strives to bring efficiency, transparency and open access to cities with a need for web-based solutions. For each city chosen, Code for America puts together a team of fellows that includes web developers, designers and entrepreneurs. The team spends 11 months designing, developing and implementing a solution to their city’s specific need.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., the Code for America team is creating an online business portal to streamline the process of starting a business. The way it stands now, prospective business owners face a maze of redundant forms, a murky view of what the process to launch a business entails, paper-based departments with limited business hours, and even some good, old-fashioned carbon-copies. The process is outdated and does nothing to help the city stimulate economic growth.

“We wanted to empower entrepreneurs, retailers and small merchants to engage with government in a frictionless manner and that wasn’t happening,” says Peter Koht, the economic development coordinator for the city of Santa Cruz. “There are different qualities of information online and no clear flowchart or transparency of how to start a business or how to make your way through it.”

One of eight cities chosen for Code for America 2012 (the others are Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Macon, Ga., New Orleans and Philadelphia) Santa Cruz is the smallest Code for America city to date. It’s also a city with an accessible government and an engaged and active tech community.

Koht, who spearheaded Santa Cruz’s application to be a Code for America city, saw the potential benefits that the project could bring, not only to Santa Cruz, but to the surrounding towns as well. Many of the municipalities around Santa Cruz contributed financially to the Code for America project, knowing they could utilize the end product.

Part of the Code for America mission is to make these city solutions extensible; to design them in a way that other municipalities can, with modification, use them for their own needs. In developing a clean, lightweight, open-source solution for one government, the Code for America team is actually developing a solution that any government can use.

“There is no local government that is not faced with this issue,” says Koht, “and we don’t have an economic imperative to compete. If we’re able to create a system that’s extensible and usable, not just for Santa Cruz, but for other communities, we really want to make life better for neighboring communities.”

Following a month-long orientation in San Francisco, the Santa Cruz team, which is made up of web developer and designer Ruthie Bendor, graphic designer Tamara Shopsin, and website and application developer Jim Craner, is now in Santa Cruz, meeting the local tech community and government officials, shadowing city planners and getting a handle on what the project entails. They need to develop a lightweight back-end that provides easy access to the necessary information as well as a user interface (UI) that is clean, clear and visually pleasing.

Shopsin, who specializes in problem solving and conceptual illustration, is charged with the task of designing the UI. “I’m not looking to make this slick and shiny,” she says. “I want to make it intuitive. Whatever we build, I feel like I can make it open itself without too many bells and whistles.”

In addition to designing a business portal, Code for America Santa Cruz is also hosting a hackathon to work with local developers on creating apps to free up government data that is available, but hard to get to.

“The government publishes a lot of material that has value but it’s not in machine-readable format,” says Koht. “But it’s public information. The app that tells me whether I should go surfing or stay at work; the app that tells me what route to take home, it’s all government data.”

The goal for the Santa Cruz Code for America team is to build something that fills a specific need for the city and also demonstrate the potential of government websites. “The big picture goal is to make it easier and less intimidating for small businesses to set up a relationship with their local government.” says Shopsin. “The opportunity with emerging tech and government is to have citizens more engaged and more thoughtful.”

Koht’s hope is that the project sparks inspiration throughout the city. “Government sites are often informative but not very visually compelling,” he says. “Our hope is to be both. Then other departments can look at it and say, ‘Hey, we can do that too.’”

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In my last blog I discussed how shoppers migrating to the Internet could mean curtains for many strip malls, big boxes and malls. 

Now I want to raise the simple question of justice involved with this trend. Internet businesses are generally free from sales taxes, while brick-and-mortar stores must tack on 4-5-6-7-8 percent to each order—including many shops that enliven our neighborhoods while meeting our needs.

Any way you look at it, this is patently unfair—a government-sanctioned bribe to buy through from Amazon instead of your local book dealer, or e-Bay rather than that cool vintage store around the corner.

In tough times like these, a lot of independent businesses are already balanced precariously on the edge of insolvency, and a few more cents added to every dollar in sales might push them right over.

Fifteen years ago, this naked favoritism toward Internet sales was viewed as a justifiable way to nurture a promising new economic sector, and to help encourage the overall growth of the worldwide web.  Well, that's ancient history now.  Big web-based retailers need this kind of public largesse like Exxon needs a small business loan.  

No one likes to pay taxes, and it’s true that sales taxes hit poor people much harder than the wealthy.  But it’s also important to remember that sales taxes bankroll a lot of state and local services we depend upon—from public transit to public education to police protection.  Less sales tax revenues; less public assets everyone can share.  

And to make matters worse, empty storefronts foreshadow a plunge in property tax revenues, which is the mainstay of many local governments. Local and state budgets have already been clobbered by rising deficits coming out of the Great Recession, and further leaks in their tax bases will mean even more draconian cuts to critical public programs.

In Minnesota alone, taxpayers must make up for $149 million in tax \ revenues lost to out-of-state e-retailers. Following the lead of California, New York, Arkansas and four other states, a bill has been proposed in the state legisltarueto apply a modest tax to e-commerce, which is winning support even from some fervent “no-new-tax” Republicans.

The New Rules Project outlines A Main Street Fairness Act which factually makes the case for a level playing field between stores in our community and Internet merchandisers.  In includes a comprehensive resource guide.

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Are you fascinated with complex urban issues? Do you wonder whether social media may offer a new design perspective? Would you like to know what threats or opportunities may come up along the way?

Michiel de Lange and Martijn de Waal of The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform held a four-day conference in Amsterdam called Social Cities of Tomorrow February 14-17 that featured an intense exchange of ideas, knowledge, and experience between diverse participants to answer these questions and more.

Here's a breakdown of the conference:

Workshop Day 1: Explore

As the workshop started, 25 people of different professional and cultural backgrounds came together to work on four real urban issues:

1. Evaluating the chances for temporal use of a huge, empty plot in Amsterdam, called Zeeburgereiland (initiator and stakeholder: architecture office Temp.Architecture)

2. Mapping the qualities of an industrial area (“Binckhorst”) in the Hague (stakeholder: cultural organization STROOM)

3. Exploring the potential of digital media for attracting young and creative people to the former industrial area in Eindhoven (stakeholder: housing corporation TRUDO)

4. Creating a civic innovator network for Amsterdam (stakeholder: municipality of Amsterdam).

After stakeholders presented the problem of each case, the rest of the day was devoted to a profound analysis of the location and the context. I went with Team 2 to the Hague where we had very inspiring, deep talks about the issues and qualities of the area with a number of involved parties: a municipality urban planner, a social artist, two company owners full of enthusiasm to share their ideas and vision, and a head of the local companies' union. After interviewing all these stakeholders, it became clear what exactly was not working. The initial request about mapping the qualities transformed into a question: How can we improve the communication channel between the municipality and the Binckhorst community?

A local artist and an urban planner tell about the opportunities and obstacles of the Binckhorst area.

Workshop Day 2: Dive

The second day began with a presentation by Ekim Tan from Play the City, a foundation for serious games in urban planning. She spoke about the challenges of bringing different stakeholders to one table, helping them to understand each other and to form a shared strategy. According to her experience, it was very important to involve the real players of the area, and not to try to imitate them with a team.

This whole day was a dive into understanding, mapping, brainstorming, and coming up with a first concept idea. At lunch, each group reported on the progress and it appeared that all groups reformulated the initial question of the case.

In the evening, a panel discussion on the subject of Design and Trust took place, hosted by Premsela (Institute for Design and Fashion). The main question of the discussion was about the role of trust in today’s shared economy and services. Writer Scott Burnham shared an insight that he has found in statistics: The loss of trust in one domain immediately results in a rise of trust in another domain (for example, the formal banking system vs. the informal one). Another interesting remark was about the vulnerability of commonly owned systems. Apparently, an element of “weakness” can make such systems resilient, as every single member is aware of and alert to this issue.

A panel presentation during the workshop explores the steps to better communication.

Workshop Day 3: Round-up and Present

It was the last day of the workshop, so the groups focused on the elaboration of the concepts and on the final presentation. The great support of this day was the presence of two experts in social hands-on interaction: Sabrina Lindemann and Kars Alfrink. They shared their knowledge of what triggers people, residents, strangers to participate and get engaged in a project.

In the evening, all the teams presented their cases and developed concepts at Mediamatic:

1. an app aiming to build a community of developers (Case 1);

2. a web-based database of ideas, problems, and requests supported by an offline lunch-bus (Case 2);

3. an experimental game zone with a website where people can plan, submit, or discuss their game ideas (Case 3);

4. and, finally, a bottom-up innovation network used as a strategic change for the municipality policy approach (Case 4).

For more detailed information about the projects and proposals, you can refer to the official blog Part 1 and Part 2.

Each presentation was followed by a response from the official partner of the case – and all of them expressed an interest in developing these concepts into more concrete and grounded proposals.

My personal impression, however, was that, although all groups made really huge progress in the three days, most of them missed the real understanding of the context, so it became either too detailed or too abstract, but none of the concepts resonated in public with the energy “Yes! It works!” I guess if the initial stakeholders were involved in the workshop process all the way, it would have helped the participants to stay more connected to the reality of each case.

More photos of the event used courtesy of Virtueel Platform:

Conference Day

The venue for the conference – Westergasfabriek – was perfectly chosen. Years ago, this area was an industrial zone with contaminated soil. Then, with the combined effort of creative partners and municipality, it was firstly transformed into a big park and then slowly it became an actively used social area with cafes, cinema, exhibitions, and fairs.

“How can we make our cities more social instead of more hi-tech? How do we design for ownership? Why are people missing in the concepts of the smart cities?” With these questions, Michiel and Martijn framed the opening of the discussion. It was remarkable for them to see that about 40 percent of the audience were architects and urbanists. This represented the change that had taken place since a similar conference four years ago, when only a few architects showed up.

Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, was the first keynote speaker. He stated that collecting data is not about creating a complete and controlled image of the world, but about providing a platform for people to share, collaborate, and make use of information around them: “Help public making data, instead of making data public.” He showed three different projects as examples for such social collaboration: Geiger Counter Kit, that was used during the Fukushima disaster to collectively measure the level of radiation; a hands-on workshop in Barcelona for collecting data about levels of pollution with the help of simple white napkins; and a rather funny project, a community game about a network of plants with sensors monitoring the level of carbon impact of your electricity consumption.

Rounding up his presentation, Usman pointed out the fundamental mistake about the role of a designer: “Designers are not here to simplify the world, but to demonstrate the complexity of it. Embrace the complexity and make an action upon it.”

Then the time came for a few showcase presentations:

• Apps for Amsterdam – results of a contest (by Alper Cugun);

• Instant Master Plan – report on using digital media for engaging citizens;

• NetworkLAB – story-telling project at NDSM wharf (by Lilet Breddels and Alexander Zeh);

• UrbanISO – developing a tangible standard for urban sensor systems (by Mac Oosterhuizen).

Natalie Jeremijenko is an urban artist and founder of Environmental Health Clinic, an experimental space where urban “impatients” are treated. With the use of art, technology, and her curiosity – “What is beyond?” – she questions our relationship toward the greater context, with the environment we live in. Natalie believes that we can learn a lot from nature and, thus, she explores human and non-human co-habitation. Among the 10 shown projects, I was especially impressed with a playful, yet serious, attempt at rediscovering the possibilities of urban flight (xAirport), developing “no parking zones” into green and recharging around soil lots (No Park), and a grid of censors located in the river indicating the presence of fish or the quality of water (Fish Censor). At the end of her talk, Natalie stated that many small actions build up significant effect.

Then the floor was given over for short presentations of the workshop and the next-round showcase presentations:

• Amsterdam Wastelands – the interactive map for stimulating temporary use of wasteland in Amsterdam (by Sacha Stolk)

• “Give Me Back My Broken Night” – a street performance work with the use of technology that asks audiences to collaboratively imagine the future of their city (by Paul Clarke and Rachel Feuchtwang)

• Homeless SMS project (by Ohyoon Kwon)

• Urban Revitalization of Social Capital (by Karli Scott)

• Koppelkiek – the social game (by Kars Alfrink)

• Screens in the Wild – designing urban screens for interaction (by Ava Fatah).

The final keynote speech was presented by Dan Hill, Strategic Design lead at the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra. He started his talk by telling about five big failures he had experienced. Later on, he explained that it is crucial for a designer to prototype and, thus, regularly fail. He continued showing his diverse projects, stressing the level of complexity of big institutions and the different ways a designer can deal with it. Policy makers, politicians, and major companies constantly make design decisions, not being aware of it. Designers should be able to participate in the design process on that level and, for that, we need to develop a new culture of decision making. We should be able to build not the architecture of a solution, but the architecture of the problem as it automatically provides us with answers.

The most popular quote of Dan’s talk was spread around twitter: “Unfortunately Government 2.0 = Government 1.0 with a Web 2.0 front-end.”

At the end, the speakers came on stage to answer questions and sum up what had been touched upon during the day. The first shared statement was that digital media/technology is not a drive in itself, but a tool only, which is very “fertile” at this moment, so we should take the advantage of it. Another subject for discussion was the changing role of a designer becoming a strategic consultant. And then one beautiful remark came from the audience: “Should not we reconsider the term 'smart cities'? If we speak about people in the center of the complex systems, 'smart cities' can be replaced with 'wise cities.' Wisdom refers to the rich history of human experience and culture. So let’s embrace the complexity of the world instead of imagining a technologically perfect future machine.”

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Interesting Dutch websites, mentioned several times during the workshop and conference:

• www.verbeterdebuurt.nl – Improve Your Neighborhood
• www.hackdeoverheid.nl – A movement for making data more open
• www.geluidsnet.nl – a website about collectively monitoring the level of noise around Amsterdam airport.

Photos by Yulia Kryazheva and Lawrence Bird. Used with permission.

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A few days ago, California took a step toward joining the 31 other states in the U.S. that have cottage food laws which allow people to sell certain foods made at home. If passed, the proposed California Homemade Food Act will open up delicious new possibilities for micro-enterprise. Many people are surprised to find out that it's illegal in their state to bake a cake or a loaf of bread in their home kitchen and then sell it to a friend. But, that's the reality of current health and safety laws in California and in 18 other states. The laws have created such barriers to the small-scale enterprises that many people are now questioning whether our laws have gone too far.

Anyone who has looked into the options for renting commercial kitchens knows that they can cost $30 per hour or much more, if such kitchens are even available for rent nearby. Building a commercial kitchen with all the necessary equipment for basic washing, baking, cooking, and storage can easily cost over $100,000. This is due, in part, to the stringent requirements for plumbing and equipment in commercial kitchens, as dictated by many state-level laws.

Cottage Food Laws -- sometimes referred to as Baker’s Bills or Homemade Food Laws -- permit people to sell certain foods made in their own home kitchen. These laws allow individuals who are interested in running their own small food business to get started developing a customer base and earning some money to supplement their income, or to save up for expanding into a regular commercial kitchen. Removing the significant financial and logistical barriers of having a commercial kitchen makes starting a food business more accessible and more feasible for a greater number of people. It also gives consumers more access to a greater variety of homemade, healthy, artisan, and unique foods at their farmers’ market, local stores, or right in their neighborhood.

Commercial kitchens must follow very strict guidelines regarding surfaces, equipment, and other building specifications. Photo credit: Greg Hahn. Used under Creative Commons license.

Cottage Food Laws typically allow for baked goods, such as cakes, cookies, pies, breads, and most candies, but usually exclude anything with uncooked dairy (such as cream and custard fillings) and meat. Most allow jams and jellies. Many also allow other non-perishable foods like seasoned popcorn, honey, dried fruit, chocolate covered nuts, and prepared blends of teas, herbs, spices, nuts, and other dry goods that do not require refrigeration.

Some cottage food laws have existed for decades, but the recent economic downturn has fueled a new wave of cottage food laws. In 2008, there were only about a dozen states with cottage food laws, and now the number is expected to surpass 31 this year. The Sustainable Economies Law Center has compiled a working table of cottage food laws existing in the 31 (and counting) number of states around the U.S.

“The consensus across the country is that there shouldn’t be so many restrictions on people who are producing non-potentially hazardous food in their own kitchens,” says Mark Stambler, a bread baker in Los Angeles, California, who was baking whole wheat bread in his hand-made brick oven in his backyard. Stambler was selling to local shops until the L.A. Health Department put an end to it. Debra Baretta has been operating her own gluten-free, vegan, organic baked goods business, Mama Baretta, in Penngrove, California, and explained to us how difficult it is to rent commercial kitchens while ensuring her products are not contaminated with gluten ingredients: “I cannot find a gluten-free kitchen to rent, so I must use the rental kitchens during off hours to make sure there is no contamination from gluten and soy flours. My home is completely gluten-free! That's a guarantee!” Though her products are gaining popularity in local farmers’ markets and grocery stores, the kitchen rental fees of $30 to $75 per hour cut into her profit margins so much that she’s been struggling to keep her small business afloat.

Homemade bread loaves are but one of the foods covered under cottage food laws. Photo credit: Paul and Aline Burland. Used under Creative Commons license.

Irene Peña, Executive Director of Proyecto Jardin, a food justice advocacy organization based in the Boyle Heights area of Los Angeles, believes a Cottage Food Law is one antidote to the ubiquitous presence of junk food and “would increase access to good, quality food in underserved communities by empowering local residents to prepare fresh and healthy, culturally relevant foods that typically do not contain harmful chemical additives and preservatives."

Interested in starting your own cottage food business? First, find out if your state has a cottage food law and what foods you can make and sell under that law. The Home-Based Baking website offers a lot of helpful resources for people thinking about getting a baking business started from home. If your state doesn’t yet have a cottage food law, we suggest that you build a coalition of interested stakeholders and find a legislator interested in introducing a cottage food law. That’s what the Sustainable Economies Law Center did, by teaming up with the Los Angeles Bread Bakers and Proyecto Jardin in Los Angeles. We shopped our bill around to a few different legislators, and the bill was ultimately authored by Assemblymember Mike Gatto (D – Los Angeles). To follow along with developments with the California Homemade Food Act, AB 1616, and to support the campaign, please visit www.cottagefood.org.

This article was written by SELC Food Policy Research Associate Christina Oatfield.

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Design is often characterized by its products rather than its processes. Tell someone you’re a designer, and the first question they’re likely to ask is: “What kind? A graphic designer? A fashion designer? Maybe an architect?” But the artifacts produced by these specialists are not what define design. Design is about problem solving and opportunity seeking, not predefined material outcomes. It’s about seeing problems as opportunities for innovation rather than obstacles to progress—and, as the Shareable community knows, simply creating more products isn’t the solution to all problems.

Design is capable of much more. In addition to products, communications, and environments, designers today are creating whole new services, systems, and experiences. The field is expanding: taking on new challenges, bridging new disciplines, and inviting new practitioners. As a sharer, you might be a designer yourself. By developing new collaborative consumption strategies and cooperative business models, you are practicing design, whether you know it or not. The goal-oriented creativity that goes into these projects can be largely intuitive, so it often goes unrecognized or simply uncharacterized as design. However, with some simple design strategies, you can be more deliberate about what you do intuitively and better direct your creativity to meet your goals.

Whether you’re planning a small charrette or a larger project, there are some basic elements, common to most design processes, that you may want to incorporate. By no means do these elements constitute the definitive design process. Like all design processes, the one below is a variation, an adaptation, a hybrid methodology. It’s also not as linear as it might seem in writing. You should expect to cycle through and repeat some stages of the process as new insights and information emerge. Use what works for you, experiment, and integrate your own techniques. Your process is yours to design. Hopefully, the following suggestions will simply provide some guidance through the challenging work of creating something new.

Preparation

Before getting started, you can take some steps to create the conditions for a successful project. The first is to understand the scope of your project and clarify the expectations of everyone involved. Simply stating a timeframe for the project will go a long way towards establishing what you can realistically hope to accomplish. Design doesn’t work without deadlines, so set up a schedule with enough time allocated for each of the stages of your process. Your project could take place over a day, a month, or a year, but all the milestones should be mapped out ahead of time. Designs have a way of never really being done, so it’s important that you make them due at some point.

You will also want to prepare a workspace that’s conducive to creativity. Design can happen anywhere: in a studio, at the office, or on the back of a bar napkin. But you’re likely to be most comfortable working in an environment that encourages experimentation and play. Often, this is somewhere you can spread out, post things up on the walls, and make a bit of a mess without anyone getting too upset.

The different stages of the design process will call for different materials, but you will be surprised how much can be accomplished with some simple office supplies and a little improvisation. At the very least, you always want to have something on hand to write and draw with. Markers are preferable to pens and pencils, because they can be read from a distance by your collaborators. Large pieces of paper or white boards are also useful for quickly visualizing ideas for everyone to see. And don’t forget Post-It notes, of course—lots of Post-It notes. These lovely little stickies are ideas just waiting to happen!

More Tools and Tips:

• Whether you’re looking for a co-working space or a design studio, Shareable.net is full of information about the kinds of environments that inspire creativity and collaboration: Designing Workspaces for Collaboration (Shareable)
• Stanford’s D School is a space designed expressly for collaborative design projects. Read about their modular “T-Walls” and DIY whiteboards in the new book, Make Space: It’s all about the space at Stanford’s design school (Stanford)

Collaboration

It’s increasingly rare to design alone these days. Almost any design project will benefit from the exchange of ideas and diversity of perspectives afforded by collaboration. When tackling complex challenges, you will often need to assemble a team with a broad range knowledge and expertise. Indeed, collaboration is becoming increasingly necessary—but that doesn’t mean it has gotten any easier. Two heads are only better than one when they work together well. Diverse, interdisciplinary teams may generate more innovative ideas, but they can also be prone to internal communication problems.

No two collaborations are the same. Each will present different challenges, but there are some common strategies you can use to minimize confusion and conflict in most cases. For starters, simply select a manageable number of teammates: 3 to 7 will usually provide enough different points of view without complicating decision making too much. These may not be the only people you work with during your project, but they will be the core team responsible for seeing it through. You may also want to bring in expert consultants to help you troubleshoot particular problems, or reach out to users and stakeholders to help you actively co-design solutions. In any case, you should assign roles and define hierarchies as much as possible, so that everyone knows what to expect from each other. If possible, designate a process facilitator who is in charge of watching the schedule, keeping people on task, and mediating conflicts—but ideally, not directly involved in making final design decisions. Finally, you should insist that everyone give each other the trust and respect necessary to feel safe to freely share ideas.

More Tools and Tips:

• Northumbria University has compiled some techniques that may be useful in managing role definition, conflict resolution, and communication in your design collaborations: Design Collaboration
• “Co-design” is an increasingly popular collaborative method aimed at attuning solutions to users’ needs by strategically involving outside stakeholders in the design process: Co-design (UK Design Council)

Orientation

The basis of a design project is the brief. This is the challenge, opportunity, or problem you hope to address, exploit, or solve with your design. In some cases, it may seem obvious, but it should never be taken for granted. Your brief will determine the direction of your entire project: how you define a problem will largely define its solution. So, before seeking any solution, you should be sure you’ve found the right problem. Framing this problem is as much a design opportunity as finding its solution. Reframing an old problem in a new way is often the key to developing an innovative solution.

How you articulate your brief will influence how you approach it, so it’s important to get the wording right. Instead of writing it like an assignment or a command, consider asking it as a question. “How might we…?” is a common way to begin. A question about how you might do something tends to leave more room for creativity than a statement about what must be done. Keep it open-ended, but be realistic about what you’re asking. Include some specifics about the people or place you are designing for rather than trying to take on the whole world at once. State the situation too broadly, and you will get lost in possibilities; articulate it too narrowly, and you will get trapped in limitations. The most fruitful design briefs provide a healthy balance of freedom and constraint.

More Tools and Tips

• Even when your design brief comes from a client or an employer, it’s important to maintain a critical perspective, as explained in this video by IIT professor Jeremy Alexis: What is Problem Framing in Design? (Jeremy Alexis, Illinois Institute of Technology)
• This post from Big Spaceship describes the difference between “problem setting” and “problem solving” and provides links to info on “abstracting” and “wicked problems": Finding the Right Design (Big Spaceship)

Exploration

Research is an important part of every stage of the design process. Some designers would characterize their process itself as a form of research: a sort of learning by doing. However, it’s useful to distinguish design research from scientific or scholarly research. Design research can involve some methods borrowed from other disciplines, such as ethnography or statistical analysis, but its perspective and objectives are often different. As a designer, you’re looking for inspiration not answers. You should be rigorous in your research so as not to be misled, but you should also feel free to experiment, make, and play.

If you are designing for a specific population or place, go there, meet people, and document what you find in words, pictures, and sounds. Map systems and visualize relationships that your encounter. Try to explore beyond the obvious and the average. Many insights go overlooked at edges and extremes. Instead of asking people about what they want or need, try to engage them in telling stories about what they feel and do. Listen carefully, but also look closely. Hidden in peoples’ behaviors and environments are all sorts of tacit knowledge and latent needs that they may not be aware of. Empathizing with people on a deeper level is the key to coming up with ideas that truly meet their needs and resonate with their desires.

More Tools and Tips:

• Engine Service Design employs a number of methods—including ethnographic user research, empathy tools, and participant journals—which may help in your research: Methods (Engine Service Design)
• “Cultural probes,” like those in the following report, are subjective methods in which the researcher hands over the instruments of observation and inquiry to the research subject: Design Probes (Tuuli Mattelmäki, Aalto University, PDF)

Ideation

Image via IDEO.

At this point, you may already have some ideas about how to address your design brief, but you should resist the temptation to immediately fix onto your first ideas. You are bound to have other ideas worth entertaining as well. You owe it to your process to create some dedicated time and space for imagination. Setting up a brainstorming session is an effective and efficient way to do this. There are many ways to structure a brainstorm, but the basic aim is always the same: generate as many ideas as quickly and freely as possible.

The innovation consultancy, IDEO, uses a brainstorming method that has become pretty standard for collaborative design groups. It begins with everyone individually generating ideas and writing and/or drawing them on Post-It notes (one idea per Post-It). Then each person presents their ideas, one at a time, as they stick their Post-Its up for everyone to see. While each person is presenting their ideas, the other people in the group keep generating ideas as they are inspired by the ideas being presented. This way everyone’s ideas get heard, and each idea has a chance to spark others.

In addition to these procedural instructions, IDEO has some general rules that it enforces religiously during its brainstorming sessions: “defer judgment; encourage wild ideas; build on the ideas of others; stay focused on the topic; one conversation at a time; be visual; and go for quantity.” To this list, you might also add: think in different scales and durations; allow playful but supportive competition; and, most importantly, have fun.

More Tools and Tips:

• You can read more about IDEO’s brainstorming rules on the company’s open-source innovation platform OpenIDEO: The Rules of Brainstorming (OpenIDEO)
• This brainstorming method is part of a larger “human centered design” process that IDEO has made shareable in a comprehensive toolkit for social innovators: Human Centered Design Toolkit (IDEO)

Synthesis

Once you have most of the ideas out of your head and on the table (or wall, as the case may be), you can begin to look at them all a bit more critically. You should not have done any organization during brainstorming, but because of the way ideas are often built on and inspired by each other, some clusters may have already emerged. Examine these assemblages in relationship to each other and to individual outlying ideas. Pick up and move around your Post-its to try out ideas in different arrangements, but be sure to document and explain each new grouping as you go along. Innovation is often found in the simple translation, combination, or reconfiguration of previously existing ideas.

Deciding which ideas to carry forward can be a delicate process. It will require your team to be both critical and compromising. Take note of what simply generates the most conversation and enthusiasm among the group, but give people a chance to speak up on behalf of less popular ideas as well. Sometimes, placing ideas into categories or a two-by-two grid (with contrasting design considerations—such as expensive vs. inexpensive, competitive versus cooperative, etc.—on opposite ends of the two axes) can help to determine which ideas best incorporate the priorities and values set forth in your design brief. If a clear winner does not rise to the top, you will need to come to consensus or vote on which idea to develop further.

More Tools and Tips:

• Design synthesis is widely seen as a purely inductive reasoning process, but in the following video Jon Kolko of Frog Design explains a more nuanced understanding: Design Synthesis (Jon Kolko, Frog Design)
• In this brief slide presentation, Parsons professor Lara Penin offers a more detailed explanation of how to use a two-by-two grid, or “polarity map,” to analyze design ideas: Polarity Mapping (Lara Penin, Parsons The New School for Design, PDF)

Prototyping

As soon as you have some direction, you shouldstart making your ideas real as soon as possible. Don’t worry about finalizing your design or making it pretty yet. There will be time for that later. Make models of your design that reveal, not conceal, its flaws. Early prototypes are not meant for presentation; they’re meant to be tested and broken. It might seem premature or inefficient to spend time fabricating a prototype of an idea you’ve only just come up with, but it will save you time in the long run. Thinking by making will reveal things that abstract thinking does not.

Prototypes will take different forms, depending on what you are designing. Simple models or mock-ups will work for physical or digital designs, but less tangible services or experiences will need to be tested through performance, storyboarding, or other forms of narrative modeling. Test pieces and parts of your design when the whole is not testable. Don’t waste time on every last detail. Don’t waste money on expensive materials. Work with what you have on hand to create props, personas, and Frankenstein monsters—whatever you need to do to see and feel what’s working and what’s not.

More Tools and Tips:

• Service blueprints, customer journey maps, and interaction storyboards are relatively new tools for modeling designs with different “touch-points” that users experience over time: Testing & Prototyping (Service Design Tools)
• The Customer Journey Canvas, from the new book, This Is Service Design Thinking, is a comprehensive framework for visualizing services and other experiential designs: The Customer Journey Canvas (This is Service Design Thinking)

Implementation

Image via MBDC.

At some point, it will finally be time to release your designs into the wild. This could happen at various stages of the process, with your design at various stages of completion. It could simply be a concept intended to start a larger conversation. It could be a prototype that has evolved into something presentable enough to be tried out on a larger audience for beta testing. Or it could be something that feels more finished. Enough iteration will allow you to sense when isolated testing is having diminishing returns and your design is ready for public consumption.

Just remember that you are responsible for what you design. Once it is out in the real world, it will start to have real consequences. Over the course of a design’s lifecycle, it may touch people and places beyond those it was intended for. Before rushing to implementation, try to visualize all potential side effects, distant stakeholders, and ecological implications. Think about how your design will be made, and also about how it will be disposed of. Think about how it might be recycled, repurposed, or shared. These might seem like distant considerations, but your choices now will influence how your design is used in the future. That’s right: you’re designing the future, so make it good.

More Tools and Tips:

• If bringing your design to life involves bringing it to market, a business model template can help you visualize your value proposition, delivery channels, revenue streams, etc.: Business Model Canvas (Business Model Generation)
• The bottom line isn’t the end of the line for any design. Truly sustainable, “Cradle-to-Cradle,” designs demonstrate equal respect for economy, equality, and ecology: Cradle-to-Cradle Framework (McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry)

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In this interview, Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo, John Robb of Global Guerrillas, and P2P foundation's Michel Bauwens talk to David de Ugarte, one of the originators of the Spanish cyberpunk scene about his more recent work developing a multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias, that is a culmination of his community's thinking and work for the last decade. Las Indias is the manifestation of a unique socio-economic philosophy that synthesizes many strains of thinking and culture including cyberpunk, anarchism, network thinking, and cooperatives - all with a Spanish twist. It's important because it points to a possible future for those who think outside of national boundaries and desire or need to take control of their own economic destiny. It's a possible future that takes the centuries old logic of cooperatives and remixes it for the urban-centered, global network society we live in today.

Michel Bauwens: Explain to us what Las Indias is, and where it comes from, and what makes it distinctive?

David de Ugarte: Las Indias is the result of the Spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. Originally a civil rights group, during the late 90s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia's “Economics of Abundance” theory. Very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks. We are very clear on this point: it is not the Internet by itself, it is the distributed P2P architecture that allows the new commons. As one of our old slogans put it: “Under every informational architechture lays a structure of power.” Re-centralizing structures – as Google, Twitter, Facebook, Megaupload, etc. do around their servers – weakens us all. The blogosphere, torrents, freenet, etc. are tools of empowerment.

Cyberpunk was mainly a conversational / cyberactivist virtual community. It became transnational quickly and contributed some very good discussions and theories that helped us understand the social impact and possibilities of distributed networks.

But in 2002 three of us founded Las Indias Society, a consultancy firm focused on innovation and networks dedicated to empowering people and organizations. Our experience soon became very important in understanding the opposition between “real” and “imagined” communities, and the organizational bases for an economic democracy. After the cyberpunk dissolution in 2007, the “Montevideo Declaration” openly stated that our objective will be to construct a “phyle,” a transnational economic democracy, in order to ensure the autonomy of our community and it members.

Now, we define ourselves around five main values:

• Distributed network architectures as a way of generating abundance, empowerment, and to ensure the widest plurarchy – the maximum of individual liberties – for the members of our community.
   
• Transnationality (which means a rejection of national identities as well as universalism) as a consequence of putting the real community of persons who live and work in Las Indias at the center of our work
   
• Economic democracy as the way to build personal and community autonomy through the market
   
• Hacker ethics as a way to foster community knowledge generation, common deliberation, personal passion, and a collective pleasure in learning
   
• Devolutionism: all our production of knowledge – books, software, contents, even recipes – is returned to the commons, generating more abundance

Neal Gorenflo: What is the vision of Las Indias? What would the classic, most developed form be in the future? What are you after in terms of how it can transform individuals, interpersonal relationships, and the world?

Our vision is not a universalist one. We don't proselytize and we really believe that diversity is a desirable consequence of freedom.

But we have a vision for us – the phyle – and a wish: to see the birth of a wider, transnational space of economic democracies. We imagine networks of phyles generating wealth, social cohesion, and ensuring liberties for real people rather than the governments' power and their borders and passports.

We are not naive nor utopian. Distributed networks gave our generation the opportunity to build a new world. But this new world, based on the commons, communities, economic democracy and distributed networks isn't complete at birth. And the old world, based on the artificial generation of scarcity, corporations, inequality, and centralized networks isn't dead.

It is very symptomatic that European crisis manifests as a debt crisis. Governments are suffocating society in order to feed privileged groups – big corporations, some sectors dependent of public money – who have captured state rents or ensured it through monopolistic law. So, the main objective and the main vision now is to stop these decomposing forces in our environments.

MB: How does Las Indias work internally? How is it funded?

There are different levels of engagement and commitment. As a phyle we are really a network. In the periphery there are individual entrepreneurs with their initiatives. In the core there are the associated cooperatives, and at that core. the indianos.
We differentiate between the community (the core of the phyle) and the Cooperative Group.

Indianos are communities that are similar to kibbutzim (no individual savings, collective and democratic control of their own coops, etc.). But there are some important differences like the lack of a shared national or religious ideology, being distributed throughout cities rather than concentrated in a compound, and not submitting to an economic rationality.

John Robb: What kind of coops are in the Las Indias network? What are the synergies between the cooperatives?

At this moment we have four coops: Las Indias (a consultancy dedicated to innovation and network analysis); El Arte (a product-lab where we develop products from books to beer to software); Fondaki (global and strategic intelligence for small businesses) and Gaman (educational tools and campaigns).

All of them are expressions of our members' different passions that answer different needs of our community and environment.

MB: How do you position yourself vis-a-vis the current global capitalist system? What alternative are you proposing?

We think cooperatives and economic democracy (a rent-free market society), hand in hand with a liberated commons as the alternative to capitalism can be made possible through distributed networks.

But we are economic democrats, so we don't want the state to provide the alternative to crony-capitalism and accumulation. Indeed, we think it can't. We have to build it by ourselves, and demand the state to remove the obstacles (as IP, contracts for big politically connected corporations, etc.) that protects privileged groups' rents from competition in the market.

The alternative will not be build through government regulations, but inside our own networks. It will not defeat the corporate organization through courts or elections, but through competition.

NG: We live in a world saturated in corporate media. How do you maintain a culture of cooperation at Las Indias in the face of this onslaught of atomizing, consumerist messages? What spiritual or cultural practices and artifacts can you point to that are especially helpful?

All of us spent many years sharing small apartments downtown, walking or going to work by bus, working in bad jobs through school and after finishing our degrees. It is not a particular condition, it is the reality of the job market in Spain, Portugal and, many Latin American countries for a wide group of middle class children of our generation.
The result of this experience for many people was a particular culture that mixed a lot of inmaterial, cultural consumption – some of it provided free by the state – with a reduced access to consumerism compared to older people.

In 1996 I was 26 finishing a degree in economics in Madrid. I worked in a call center earning 450€ a month working eight hours a day from four to midnight. I spent 300€ on the rent, around 100€ for food, electricity, telephone and public transport and 48€ on an Internet connection. As you can imagine, my “leisure” time was spent around the public library, museums, the public filmotheca (60 cents for a ticket to a classic movie), at cheap potluck dinners and, of course, online.

My experience was not extraordinary at all, and it's even more common now.
This mode of cultural consumption based on public cultural goods, cheap second-hand or popular edition books and “cocooning,” the P2P world made sense in our everyday culture.

So, some years later our incomes increased, we earned autonomy, but for us a good living still means good broadband, access to cultural works, good museums, and good meals in comfortable but not very expensive flats downtown.. None of us has a car or has bought a house.

But please don't get confused. We don't make of austerity a cult. We simply have a different culture, we enjoy different things. None of us has a TV neither, but many of us have projectors for watching videos off the Internet.

NG: In Spain, you're often associated with the cyberpunk movement, which was born in the US in the early 80s. How has cyberpunk influenced you and Las Indias? And how is cyberpunk relevant today?

Cyberpunk activism was strongly influenced by cyberpunk literature. Even today classic cyberpunk works like Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net or Green Days in Brunei and post-cyberpunk like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age provide models for discussing subjects we think are important at this moment: distributed vs centralized networks, economic democracy vs corporate power, etc.

Cyberpunk taught us to discuss in a mode outside the political tradition: not around theses and programs, but around models and myths, where auto-criticism and irony were easier and dogmatism almost impossible.

MB: For me, some of the most innovative concepts in the Las Indias books were the concepts of phyles and neo-venetianism. What do these mean?

Phyle is a community that develops an economic structure based in economic democracy in order to ensure its own autonomy. The order of the terms is important: phyle is a community with firms, not a community of firms, nor a community of people who own some firms. The firms are tools for the autonomy of the community, a mean, not and end, and are always less important than the needs of community members.
Neovenetianism is the ideology of those who see phyle-making as the natural evolution of their communities in order to make its conversation, its deliberation, autonomous of the political or economic decomposition of the states and the markets they live in.

Virtual communities are by nature transnational. If they have borders, these are the borders of language. A few days ago I saw a Tweet saying “When the Canadian border crossing guards asked me where I was from, I was really tempted to say 'the internet.'” Many people feel like that Twitter. But that causes a kind of schizophrenia: their life becomes divided in two, the virtual life and the working life. Phyles reunify our lives around our intentional virtual community.

MB: What do the new concepts of the sharing economy (Shareable), p2p (P2P Foundation), the commons, and resilience (Global Guerrillas) evoke for you, and how does Las Indias relate to them?

P2P means distributed networks, commons, abundance. It's the meaning of life!

The sharing economy means community, autonomy, commons, gift, joy, abundance again. It is the real sense of our core, the “how-to” of abundance, the way we live.

Resilience is at the same time the golden rule and the consequence of building community on a shared economy under a P2P architecture. It is our main virtue and the only thing that can guarantee survival even under increasing global decomposition.

JR: Any plans for micro-finance or a bank to speed cooperative growth?

Yes! We have signed an agreement with the main credit cooperative in Uruguay – which is based on microfinance – in order to do it in Uruguay. We hope it will start having results this year.

But in a way, Las Indias Cooperative Group through its “Cooperative Investment Funds” works like that with less funding but in a wider area (Spanish and Portuguese speaking communities). We want to invest in new coops as a way of helping communities to gain autonomy, but there are few cooperative entrepreneurs, or at least fewer than we would like there to be. So we are considering making the diffusion of cooperative values and its possibilities our main strategy for the coming year.

And we are also betting on “Bazar” a free piece of p2p software that will be released in the next weeks. Bazar is dedicated to creating trade and collaboration networks between groups of coops, small firms, etc., as we believe that collaboration between and globalization of “the small” is a key issue.

JR: How long does it take to train a regular person in cooperative business practices? Are there plans for teaching cooperative thinking online to grow it faster?

It takes a time! Unfortunately almost everything in the mainstream culture teaches us that the world is a zero-sum game, and that markets must be ruled by jungle law, but the simple truth is that they shouldn't be and we, people, can make the difference.

Until now, we have focused on online courses, books, papers, documentaries, and novels for the new "indiano" to read and discuss on their blog. New indianos spend six months on P2P culture – from Sterling and Bey, to Stephenson and Urrutia – and around three months more on cooperative practices.

JR: How do Las Indias cooperatives tie into the physical community?

Our sense of community is indeed very physical on all levels. The inner circle, los indianos, try to work together as much as possible, sharing offices or houses.

The wider community, the aggregation of our families and close friends, is at the center of our concerns. I mean, it is not only the question of time management, the possibility of spending more time with your people than in a “normal job.” The kind of security you build in a model like ours it is not only about yourself, you know that all the common resources will be ready for your family and your people if they will need it.

MB: Where will humanity be in 20 years?

I hope we will see big transnational spaces with freedom of movement and trade, instigated by networks of economic democracies building wider commons accessible to everyone.

I hope we will know a society where capitalism will be marginal but with a market that will not allow rents nor privileges, where the mix of small and ubiquitous tools of production will be furthered by big global repositories of public domain designs as innovative and popular as free software is now.

I hope we will be living in a transitional society in twenty years but it is not historically determined. There are a lot of agents pushing towards recentralization: IP lobbies, big Internet firms, rent seekers, state machinery, financial interests, global mafias, etc. So the possibility of terminal nationalism and statism with its social decomposition is also there.

The choice between a society of freedom, based in an egalitarian market and robust commons, and global decomposition depends of our actions in this decade.

##

Check out these free books by David de Ugarte, which further articulate his unique vision:

• The Power of Networks
• Nations
• Phyles

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Times are tough for American cities. Facing budget shortfalls, municipalities are slashing public programs, reducing staff, and in some cases, barely staying solvent. Ultimately, it’s the city’s residents who feel the pain, particularly ones in low-income communities who rely on public services. As city officials increasingly eye the bottom line, software upgrades and open government initiatives are shuttered or indefinitely delayed out of necessity, even though such efforts could increase efficiency and directly benefit the citizenry. It’s a dire state of affairs, one which Code for America aims to address.

Code for America was founded in 2009 by Jennifer Pahlka, who helped organize the first Gov 2.0 Summit in collaboration with TechWeb and Tim O’Reilly. Though she was initially focused on the federal government, a conversation with Andrew Greenhill of the City of Tucson about the difficulties facing cities prompted her to refocus her attention on municipalities. This inspired Code for America, a non-profit that works with city governments and residents to identify pressing needs that can be addressed through web applications.

“People don’t realize what a huge financial crisis cities are in, and that they need to come up with new ways to get by in the next decade,” says Pahlka. Beyond the immediate effects this can have on the lives of residents, dissatisfaction with city governance can sour them on the entire civic process. “It ties back to citizens’ expectations and interactions with government,” she says. “On a day to day level, citizens are interacting with their cities.”

Serving citizens and improving civic engagement are core goals for Code for America. “Early on, we settled on three major things we were trying to do: openness and transparency, engagement, and efficiency,” she says. “There are a lot of efficiencies to be gained in the government, but we’re most interested in opportunities where we are opening it up to the citizens and doing all three.” Perhaps most crucially, the organization requires that all web applications their Fellows develop for pilot cities can be deployed by other cash-strapped municipalities.

Code for America chooses a limited number of cities from a set of applicants each year to target its efforts. Once chosen, the non-profit dispatches teams of Code for America Fellows—volunteer software engineers, designers, community organizers and more who pledge a year to the program—to work with city managers and citizens to identify web-based solutions to the cities’ needs.

“We’re looking for cities where there’s enough political will and broad support for trying different things,” Pahlka says. “It’s not hard to find a city where there’s one or two people interested in a new approach, but it’s harder to find cities where that appetite for change is more broad-based.”

In 2012, Code for America is focusing on eight cities—Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Honolulu, Macon, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Santa Cruz—expanded from three in 2011, the first year of the program. I spoke with members of the teams in Chicago, Detroit, and Austin, to find out how Code for America turns its lofty goals into effective solutions to city governance and civic engagement issues.

Chicago: The City of Big Platforms

Since Rahm Emanuel succeeded Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2011, the City of Chicago has aggressively pursued Gov 2.0 initiatives. Under the supervision of its Chief Technology Officer John Tolva, Chicago is updating its 311 system, a phone-based system for citizens to request non-emergency city services. Code for America’s Chicago team is working with Tolva to deploy Open311, an open data platform that would make the service more accessible to residents and allow the city to share data with other cities that have adopted the standard.

“Inside the city there are a lot of different applications accessing data in different ways,” says Code for America Fellow Ben Sheldon, a web developer and community organizer. “We’re trying to build out Chicago’s data platform and make it more open and accessible inside and outside the government.”

Open311 is only the beginning. The team have been meeting with city aldermen to identify how an open data platform can help them better serve the communities they represent. They’re also reaching out to local entrepreneurs to build a sustainable ecosystem for such platforms. “Right now Chicago has a very young open data ecosystem, and they’re doing some cool stuff,” says Sheldon. “But we’re asking: ‘how can we move beyond one-shot apps from hackathons and move to where businesses can be built on this data?’”

The team is also meeting with community groups, non-profits and journalists to identify needs and opportunities outside of the governmental and entrepreneurial spheres. “There’s multiple layers,” Sheldon says about the process. “There’s open data, getting it out there, and then asking, ‘how do you contextualize it? How do you get this data to people who can do something about it to drive civic action?’”

Detroit: Blight, Access, and Rebirth

Not every municipality that applies has a set roadmap. In some cases, those are the cities where the needs are most dire. In the case of Detroit, the city’s goals were less specific than Chicago’s. “Initially they submitted a proposal that gave an overview about the issues they wanted to tackle,” says Detroit Fellow and community organizer Alicia Rouault. “For example, they wanted to figure out how to deal with vacancy and blighted property with technology. There’s a need for a consolidated point of entry for the public to access info about property in Detroit.”

With the team on the ground for five weeks, the members are working to identify opportunities to support initiaives both inside and outside of city hall to better serve disadvantaged residents and community-building efforts. “A big priority area is engagement,” Rouault says. “We’re looking at issues of access to information, and also working to get the citizen-up perspective.” To do this, the team is casting a wide net. “We’re looking at the Department of Transportation and things we can do about bus schedules and gaps in the process, as well as the urban farming community and the arts community, to see how we can support the work they’re doing.”

Rouault sees an opportunity to not only facilitate more efficient and effective government services, but also contribute to Detroit’s economic rebirth. In her meetings, Rouault has observed that “people are frustrated with the public perception, the way newspapers and magazines have focused on what’s called ‘ruin porn’, when in fact the city is full of wonderful people doing amazing things and it’s a vibrant place. We hope to promote the work that’s being done here.”

Austin: Making Connections in a Wired City

In the case of Austin, the city explicitly requested assistance with its efforts to improve communication and engagement with the citizenry. “The city wants to reach out to the community better,” says designer Emily Wright Moore of the Austin team. “There’s a huge push to get data open on the portal so developers can use it, the problem is having disparate systems that don’t link to one another,” she says, echoing the sentiments of city officials and Gov 2.0 developers in many municipalities, who contend with mountains of data silo’d in proprietary or outdated applications only used by a specific department.

In some cases, solutions to such problems aren’t as imposing as they might first seem. “You have to talk to people, listen to them, and sometimes the answer is really easy,” Moore says. “The city has 12,000 employees and they’re using paper timesheets. Human Resources told us ‘this is a huge problem, but we don’t want you deal with this.’ I tried to explain to them that we can start small, and build from there—have one pilot department, and give them fillable PDF’s.”

The team is also looking to connect Austin’s thriving web development community with city officials. “One thing we’re really focusing on is the civic coding community,” says Moore. “A lot of that community exists, but it's not necessarily unified or directed to working with the city,” says Moore’s teammate Joe Merante, a lawyer, policy analyst and developer. “We’re hoping to be a catalyst for getting these people to talk."

The team is also considering how they can serve the city’s low-income communities. “We haven’t gotten to reach out to areas like East Austin yet,” Moore says. “But it’s on our radar. We’re considering organizing teaching hackathons in some of the city’s economically disadvantaged areas.”

Serving the Citizens Who Live the Data

To paraphrase comedian Lewis Black, city governments aren’t large buildings that walk around doing stuff—they’re made up of individual people. And some of those officials and employees will inevitably be resistant to Code for America’s efforts, whether out of complacency, disenchantment with failed previous technology initiatives, or a distrust of outsiders. For their part, some citizens and community groups view Gov 2.0 efforts suspiciously, believing that cities should focus on pressing needs that may not be best served by new technologies, and posing questions about how open government data could be misused.

“I think it’s good for people to skeptical about change in city government, but it’s also important for the government of cities to try new approaches,” says Pahlka. “It’s about offering approaches and learning about the cities’ needs and the challenges they have.” When working with the city officials, “We try to make it a two way thing,” she adds. “We don’t want to fall in to the consultant trap where we’re telling government what they should be doing.”

In Sheldon’s view, it’s essential to not lose sight of the ultimate goal: to better serve communities and inspire civic action. “A lot of these conversations are happening at the city level, but having conversations with people at the community level is also really important,” he says.

He notes that when pushing open data initiatives, the type of data released and how it’s contextualized can directly affect citizens, sometimes negatively. Speaking of the larger Gov 2.0 movement, he says, “we can’t just keep putting out crime maps. Crime data is the first thing that’s always released, and there’s little context added to that. I don’t think that changes anybody’s perceptions or makes them think differently about the world around them. You have to ask, 'how is the media framing the data, and how can the community contextualize it itself?' Open data has a very broad, grass-roots element, so it’s important to create diverse groups where people can have those conversations with the other people who are living that data.”

Peer-to-Peer Civic Governance

While the teams on the ground in the eight charter cities are busy identifying needs, brainstorming solutions, they’re also looking to connect tech-minded government officials with civic-minded developers in the community so that the applications they develop over the next nine months will remain supported in the years ahead. Code for America views these programs as a starting point, not a finish line, for municipalities. To facilitate these connections, each team is hosting meetings and mixers, and organizing hackathons that will take place during Code Across America: A National Day of Civic Innovation on Saturday, February 25th.

Looking forward, Pahlka’s goals for Code for America remain both pragmatic and idealistic. “I’d like us to figure out how 311 can go from being a one-way transaction to something we can all share,” she says. Pahlka envisions 311 as more than cities providing “customer service”—she sees it as an opportunity for municipalities and citizens to explore a peer-to-peer model of city governance.

“You can’t fix government if citizens aren’t deeply involved,” she says. “I think the future of government is much more peer-to-peer. It’s a platform for people lending a hand and helping one another. If we can find new ways for cities to interact with citizens, and citizens step up to the plate and act like the institution of government belongs to them and the health of communities are something they can take a part in, then we’ll have done something that we can be proud of.”

(Disclosure: Paul M. Davis is writing event recaps of Code for America’s “Data for the Public Good” talks for event sponsor Greenplum on a freelance basis. Research and reporting for this Shareable article was conducted independently from Code for America or Greenplum.)

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SXSW Interactive 2012 will be here before we even know it, with all the opining, connecting, and imbibing that it entails. Taking place from Friday, March 9 through Tuesday, March 13th in Austin, Texas, there's a large number of panels, talks and parties sure to be of interest to the Shareable community. We’ll be on the ground in Austin for the entire week, reporting on the event as well as hosting a panel at the conference and our party. As you plan your schedules for the week, be sure to slot in Shareable’s events, as well as other talks and panels we recommend below.  And if we've made a glaring omission, please add it in comments.

Official Shareable Events

What Makes Asset Sharing Platforms Thrive?
Sunday, March 11, 9:30AM -10:30AM
Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon D, 500 E. 4th St.
Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo moderates an interactive discussion with innovators, investors, and thought leaders in the Sharing Economy. Featuring Shelby Clark of RelayRides, Christopher Lukezic of Airbnb, Jamie Shea of the University of Michigan Social Venture Fund, and Ann Miura-ko of Floodgate, the discussion will explore what qualities make sharing platforms thrive. With an increasing crowded planet and dwindling natural resources, there may be no more important challenge than making sharing sexy, fun, and scalable. The panelists will share their insights to help the SXSW community succeed in the sharing economy.

SAVE THE DATE: SHARE Austin! - Shareable’s SXSW Party
Monday March 12, 5:30PM - 9:00PM
Cheer Up Charlie’s, 1104 East 6th Street, Austin
More details coming soon!

Shareable’s SXSW Event Picks

The 2012 Global Coworking Unconference Conference
Thursday, March 8, 8:00PM - 8:00PM
The AT&T Conference Center, 1900 University Avenue
The 2012 Global Coworking Unconference Conference (GCUC) will give all individuals in the coworking community an opportunity to engage in person with one another, share purpose and passion, and refresh their energy in the process.

Design for Social Innovation and Public Good
Saturday March 10, 12:30PM - 1:30PM
Austin Convention Center Room 9ABC, 500 E Cesar Chavez St
A new movement is gaining momentum in the design world— a movement to expand the applications of high design beyond its elitist client base to solve complex social problems. This panel will engage an array of leaders in the public interest design movement who use design thinking in various ways to address global challenges and engender social innovation at different scales.

Winning the Story Wars
Saturday, March 10, 4:00PM - 4:20PM
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom G, 500 E Cesar Chavez St
Viral storyteller and Shareable cofounder Jonah Sachs (Story of Stuff, The Meatrix) speaks about effective storytelling in the digital age, and provides insights about how to replace consumerism with a new, more life-affirming and sensible story where sharing is central.

An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant
Monday, March 12, 12:30PM - 1:30PM
Austin Convention Center, Room 9ABC, 500 E Cesar Chavez St
Instead of guns and knives, the revolutionaries who descended upon Tahrir Square on Feb. 1 packed a potent arsenal of technological tools that ended the corrupt, 30-year reign of President Hosni Mubarak. Their weapons of choice: Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – everyday tools that can be used to plan a party or plot a revolution. But when Mubarak’s government hit the kill switch, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – and those using these tools to rally – were rendered powerless. When the Internet goes black, as it did Jan. 27, how do revolutionaries access these invaluable social channels to communicate, mobilize and ultimately overthrow an unjust government? How do citizens in radio silence tune into the rest of the world – without incurring the wrath of their government?

Cool Like You, Gov Private Sector Envy
Tuesday, March 13, 3:30PM - 4:30PM
AT&T Conference Hotel, Salon B, 1900 University Avenue
This session explores how government technologists deal with the demands of meeting customer needs in a world where private industry sets the pace. Can government ever be as cool as their corporate counterparts? Are the challenges of doing more with less, attracting emerging talent and maneuvering through excessive politics and bureaucracy too much to overcome? New and groundbreaking partnerships between government and private sector, non-profits and community groups may provide the answers to these questions. Fellowship programs like Code for America, community crowd sourcing like Austin’s OpenAustin and business partnerships may just give the government geek a shot at being one of the cool kids.

SXSW Interactive Keynote Speech: Coding the Next Chapter of American History
Tuesday, March 13, 2:00PM - 3:00PM
Austin Convention Center, Ballroom D, 500 E Cesar Chavez St
Code For America’s Founder and Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka delivers the keynote address at the SXSW Interactive conference, which will examine how geek skills can be harnessed to transform the world for the better.

The Airbnb of Anything: The Growth of P2P Markets
Tuesday, March 13, 12:30PM - 1:30PM
Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon C, 500 E. 4th St.
VC’s are recognizing that peer-to-peer marketplaces are the hot start-up space this year, reporting remarkable growth and unleashing a wave a disruptive innovation. The peer-to-peer movement is changing not just what we consume, but how we consume it. In this panel, CEOs recently featured in Fast Company's "Sharing Economy" piece, will dig in to the global P2P groundswell and divulge secrets behind the social sharing movement.

The Future of Work and the Free Radical
Tuesday, March 13, 12:30 - 1:30PM
Courtyard Marriot, Brazos
Over the last ten years a new way of working has emerged, along with some people who live it every day. They’re available 24/7. They network endlessly, and then plug their skills into others’ in surprising combinations. They choose when and how they do what they do, on their terms. They don’t want job security – they want career fluidity. We call them free radicals. And they’re creating the future of work.

Work When Startup Culture Hits Mainstream
Monday, March 12, 12:30PM - 1:30PM
Courtyard Marriott, Rio Grande Ballroom
What happens when suddenly a whole nation’s work life turns upside down? And what changes must be made to acclimate the majority of the U.S. workforce to a wholly different work style? This panel will dissect the growing trend of “startup-ness” that is building outside the technology industry and discuss what changes are needed, what innovations this may bring about, and whether or not entrepreneurialism and startup culture is made for the masses.

4-Hour Work Week Is BS: Truths of Working Smarter
Sunday, March 11, 5:00PM - 6:00PM
Hilton Austin Downtown Salon GF
Work is everywhere. In the office, on a plane, in your car, at Peet's Coffee down the street. It's virtually inescapable. And while everyone would love to believe the 4-Hour Work Week is possible, is this the reality in today's market? Can you successfully manage and execute multiple projects within a global ecosystem with a team that has several, if not all, workers contributing remotely? Let's have a frank conversation with today's industry pioneers and thought leaders, shedding new light on how we work. 

Connected Cars, Connected Cities and Urban Driving
Monday, March 12, 3:30PM - 4:30PM 
Hilton Austin Downtown, Room 616AB, 500 E. 4th St.
As population density in major urban areas changes, cities across the globe are inputting measures aimed at reducing urban congestion. At the same time, in response to environmental concerns, government regulations, and rising gas prices, automakers are developing and manufacturing electric vehicles at a faster pace. These EVs are becoming increasing connected, passing and receiving information from the cloud, primarily to manage their charge but increasingly to optimize the driving experience. How will population density, digitally connected cities, lowered investment in public transportation, and connected cars change the needs and behaviors of urban drivers? How should digital technologies be leveraged to meet their needs both inside and outside the vehicle? The panel will lead an exploration of the digital tools that will support the future of urban mobility.

 

Are there talks, panels or parties we’ve missed? Let us know in the comments!

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