From Platform Coops to Exit to Community— with Nathan Schneider

Tune in to this episode as we explore the cooperative movement and the different forms of community opportunities it provides. We also discuss ‘benevolent dictatorship’, levels of community participation, multi-stakeholder structures, and what we mean by community.

To find out more about Nathan’s work:

• Website: https://nathanschneider.info/
• MEDLab: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/

Other references and mentions:

• Start.coop: https://start.coop/
• Stocksy United: https://www.stocksy.com/
• Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy, 2018: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Everyone-Radical-Tradition-Shaping-ebook/dp/B078W6L1V7
• Loco: https://loco.coop/
• Morshed Mannan and Nathan Schneider, Exit To Community: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy, 2021: https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/exit-to-community-strategies-for-multi-stakeholder-ownership-in-the-platform-economy/GLTR-05-2021/
• Nathan Schneider, Mediated ownership: capital as media, 2020: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0163443719899035
• S2 EP. 18: Software and Protocols for a new way of Organizing — with Bryan Peters, Rob Solomon & Sascha Kellert: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/software-and-protocols-for-a-new-way-of-organizing-with-bryan-peters-rob-solomon-sascha-710b858dd77b
• The Metagovernance Project: https://metagov.org/
• Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Joshua Z. Tan, Amy X. Zhang, Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities, 2021: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449090

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 1 June 2021.

Key Insights

1. To start a successful cooperative movement or organization — whether on- or offline — it is not enough to be attracted to the idea of cooperativism. You need to pay attention to the core business vision, product-market fit, or even a community of interest. Looking at the history of successful cooperatives, there has often been that key entrepreneur, sometimes acting as a “benevolent dictator”, who makes things happen (think Alphonse Desjardins for the credit union movement). Still, according to Nathan, the “real problem” is not the leadership, but “to make sure that organizations are able to mature from having that strong leadership at the outset toward having appropriate accountability as the organization matures”.

•  Listen to the discussion around entrepreneurship and cooperativism from around min 7:49.

2. Nathan believes that while we need different pathways for community ownership, we don’t need infinite stories. What’s often lacking at the moment are practical tools able to create the kinds of outcomes that communities need. In his recent Georgetown Law Tech Review paper — co-authored with Morshed Mannan — they outline three possible tools to allow ventures to “exit to community”: i. the trust model, where ownership is centralized in a trust that is governed by a trustee; ii. the federation model, businesses composed of multiple independent business entities, and; iii. and the tokenization model, using blockchain technologies, whose rules are yet to be fully explored. What the three models have in common, is that ownership is malleable, and more like a bundle of ownership.

•  Listen to the different options that Nathan finds important for the question of community ownership and governance around min 15:55.

3. Going deeper into the rabbit hole of governance, we explore some of Nathan’s most recent work on what he has called “Modular Politics” in a recent paper, and which in the conversation he likens to a renaissance of democratic accountability “catching up to my mother’s garden club” and experimenting with governance “legos”. As he sums up: “I think of the metaphor of […] WordPress plugins, where every time you build a new site, you have to cobble together a bunch of tools that people have built. And you bring in your e-commerce thing, and you bring in your newsletter plugin, and you bring in your social media plugin, and suddenly you’ve got a real working website. You know, I imagine something like that, where people are able to cobble together the right mechanisms for the kind of job that they’re trying to accomplish, the kind of community that they’re trying to build”.

• Listen to the last part of the conversation on governance around min 44:29.

The Boundaryless Conversations Podcast is about exploring the future of organizing at scale by leveraging on technology, network effects, and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous.