 So while I was writing the book, Post Capitalism, an interesting thing happened to the word sharing. The open source community and the peer-to-peer community had been looking for a way to explain the fairly complicated idea of network collaborative consumption. And sharing had seemed like a good enough word for it. But by the time my book came out, the idea of the sharing economy had become associated with companies of a very different nature. And with different aims, who seemed to be very rapidly grabbing space in the economy to facilitate a race to the bottom in terms of the various industries. And the word sharing had become negative if you were, for example, a registered tourist hotel in Barcelona or a registered cab driver in many UK cities. There have been, indeed, riots in France, raids on a corporate HQ in the Netherlands, 100,000 euro fines imposed in Berlin on people using the so-called sharing economy. And in Britain, massive court case over the employment status of Uber drivers and strikes by delivery drivers. So these are the early phase reactions to something. Another way of dealing with this land grab, something I would, in general, categorise as a rent-seeking land grab by very highly capitalised companies into the collaborative economy itself. In a way, one way of thinking about these companies is that they are a way of preventing Linux or Wikipedia appearing in a space, a preemptive strike against collaboration and open source. But another way of dealing with the platforms, as we call them, is to do what they were originally designed to do, but co-operatively. Fair Mondo began life in Germany in 2012 as a co-operatively-owned marketplace that would promote fair goods and services and responsible consumption. It is owned and run democratically by its members. Felix Wett is its founder, and I'm very pleased to invite Felix to talk with me to that this afternoon. Right. What is Fair Mondo? Yeah, happy to be here. Fair Mondo is, as you said, an online marketplace. Imagine it as an eBay or Amazon marketplace where you as private people or professional sellers can buy and sell things. At the same time, and that's maybe the more interesting part, we tried to do it with a different model. We tried to make it as a co-operative owned by its users, by its employees and all stakeholders who basically feel affected by the business. Okay, but just describe to me, it's almost a bit weird asking people to describe an online experience. It's like, tell me what it's like inside World of Warcraft, but tell me what it's like if you go on and use this. What does a user experience typically involve? Really not so different of standard online shops or Amazon or eBay. You'll find products, you can look for them, you get descriptions. One thing that is special is that we have filters that actually make it easy to identify fair trade products, products that are sustainably produced, or products that are produced by small producers who put an emphasis on quality. In terms of the people who are advertising or trying to market through the platform, can you describe a typical person, a typical organisation or business? It's quite diverse, but one good example is the Fairphone, I think it was mentioned already, but that's for me a futuristic product or a product for the time, a fair smartphone that is actually produced in a way that the supply chain is actually taking account of. The workers are actually respected in the way they produce. Okay, so we kind of got an idea of what it is. Why? Why did you do it? Where did you come from, what were you doing before in other words, and what made you want to do this? I personally came from anti-corruption work, more on the political side, if you want so, and then realised that if we want to change the problem of corruption, at some point we have to address the way how businesses work. At the same time I used a lot of eBay, so eBay was for me one thing to look into, and I didn't like the way it worked anymore. The more I discussed, the more I thought about it. Well, I came up with the idea to create a new online marketplace owned by the users, and then discussed more and more, and other people joined in, and we ended up creating a cooperative and developing this model. Now, you've called the business model of FEMO under itself cooperative 2.0. Can you explain what, because you could have done this, you could have easily done, achieved the social aim, not actually as an innovative cooperative. What is it you're trying to do to the cooperative model itself? Yeah, if you look at it, I mean there are many big cooperatives out there, we all know them, in banking, in retail, in supermarkets and so on, and not all of them are really living up to the values that we were aspiring for. So we wanted to create a model that is corruption resistant, that even if we grow as a company, we'll keep its values at the forefront. So we try to incorporate the principles of anti-corruption into the cooperative model, which is accountability, transparency, integrity. And in terms of the employees, what does that mean for their everyday existence? So since we want to have a culture of participation and internal democracy, we didn't want to inscribe a management model or anything into our statutes, which would become too rigid. So the only thing we actually put into the statute is that the managing board, which we are required to have by German law, is elected by the employee assembly. So there's some kind of, well, way for employees to take influence if those who are in the role of the management start going crazy. What do you think you've achieved? Good question. So far, we managed to build a cooperative and get some traction with that. We have over 2,000 members. We found that there's quite a lot of people who are interested in seeing this alternative happening, like bringing down Amazon basically was our original mission. And we also realized that it's not that easy. Okay, we knew from the beginning that it wouldn't be so easy, but yeah, we found a lot of obstacles. But we made the marketplace happening. You can use it, you can buy and sell stuff on it. And the one thing I think we also helped to happen is that there's a movement now called platform co-optivism that really wants to look into, well, how can we do this with all of these platforms out there? And I think that's what we need. So I know you've been recently at a global conference of the platform co-operatives. What is the latest thinking among practitioners who are trying to build these things about the now, the near-term potential of them, and what's really fighting them? Are there any great, apart from yourselves, globally relevant case studies of what's happening? Yeah, so one of the things that's happening now is really encouraging collaboration among ourselves. And I think that's what we need, like looking at others who are doing similar stuff and seeing where can we collaborate with. We try to create some kind of consortium that helps new platform co-ops to get going, exchange information and all that. And obviously one of the crucial challenges is always for startups, financing, funding, capital. We are also starting with that. And these markets, if you look at platforms, they often tend to grow to enormous extent and get monopoly type of positions in their markets very hard to actually compete with. And very hard to create alternatives that are visible and usable in the very technical sense. So developing the open source software that we developed nearly brought us down just because we basically spent all our money on it. So the typical platform co-oprative is struggling with, I mean it is in a declaration of war situation on these big venture capital financed disruptors. And it's typically struggling with scale. Isn't there an argument that some of them have achieved scale because the first user experience was so great? And second because some of the things they were disrupting were so bad in the sense of the local mafia controlled taxi firms very highly organised and overpriced local hotel situations. What do you say to that argument? Because that's their defence ultimately. I think they're not just doing evil. I mean they actually bring something useful to society. They just structured the wrong way. And I think if we want to address this we really have to think about, how can we provide actually better products? There are always things that you can do better and innovate on. At the same time you also have to see that they are pushed into the markets a lot and a lot of capital. They've been working in a small scale and then venture capital comes in and more investment banking and so on and they use billions to make this so big and to actually get the market power that then creates the network effects that make them so nice for customers. I'm thinking specifically of, I'm almost like an expert, a user expert on mini cab apps. Not because I like mini cabs. But there was an interesting one. A more normal sort of entrepreneurial private sector one taxi beat that took over the, well it's trying to take over the cab system of Athens and it had in some senses all the things that the users like so women like it because you see a named driver. Not some guy who has borrowed the licence of somebody else. You can give them a mark. It wasn't rocket science even for the normal private sector to work out that information technology can transform the user experience. Why do you think, why did we need those big venture capital to come in and do it? Why didn't we just do it from scratch ourselves? In other words, why didn't somebody do Fair Mondo before eBay? What's gone wrong? Okay, but eBay grew also from a community driven kind of enterprise and I think at the time nobody was even considering the cooperative model for digital businesses. I think that was just not in the mind and you don't learn it at business schools and nowhere, not in Silicon Valley. So how should they think of it? I think we needed these experiences to see okay, they create monopolies. They're very hard to control from the state side. So how can we actually create the next model that is just better than what we see right now. And I think what Silicon Valley in general is doing very well is testing business models quickly and technologies and scaling them very quickly. Classical businesses have a hard time competing with that. From your point of view, from Fair Mondo itself, what is the scaling strategy? The original one was certainly to say it's very hard to do it on the classical business way. Even much more resourced businesses tried it. So we thought, okay, we combine the dynamics from social movements with business and that's how we managed to create a cooperative and create a first user base and I hoped that we would get enough resources to actually provide a good product which we're still kind of struggling with. But it's going step by step. I think the next strategy is really to think about how to collaborate with the existing cooperative movement where there are enormous resources out there. Big cooperative banks, but also other co-ops that we all know that do have resources and potential to reach out to people and to also capitalise certain ventures. So, yeah, we need to create new frameworks of doing that. I mean, for me, one of the things I constantly come back to in my work on the, whatever you want to call it, I call it post capitalism, people can call it whatever, is the need to make micro regulatory changes so that you incentivise the creation of good sharing businesses rather than destructive ones. Is there anything concrete that you think, for example, what would in the German situation or even here begin to factor finance towards your organisation rather than the constant flow of finance into the more destructive forms of the model? So, for a model in particular, we really try to just rely on members. We wanted to have this experiment of having a co-op of marketplace only owned by users and really having no big investors in there. That's one approach and we have a difficulty from the regulatory side that in Germany you need hand sign applications to actually become a member so we can't have pure online applications where we would have so many more members. It's really a, they have to send us a letter and people are not used to that anymore. That's the real thing and another point is if you look at how the business support structure is working for many grants or for many credits so that you can get, you need to have a certain business structure and co-operators are not in there so we really have a competitive disadvantage, no equal market if you want so. So this is something that we find in the UK, for example, when we see credit unions, it's a fairly old form of co-operative finance and getting them to the situation where they are encouraged by a regulation. Also ethical banking is something that we just, our regulatory system has kind of not encouraged. What is the one big change you would make if you could? I mean under European law, we're still in Europe, is there one big thing you would want to change? Well first of all make that even level playing field then obviously I think we need proper cartel laws to actually bring down those actors who took market positions that are very hard to challenge if you look at Amazon who own 25% of the whole e-commerce market in Germany throughout all categories of products. That's not, even with classical thinking market policies that's not aligned anymore. I mean why didn't the European regulators step in and say, since there has to be four banks on every high street in Britain or three or four energy companies, why must there only be one eBay or one Facebook? They just not realise this was happening. I think there are many reasons. The internet is complicated to regulate. They are incorporated in multiple countries. They have complicated and transparent internal structures to get around this. There are so many issues. You could also ask why aren't they paying taxes. I think it's not easy and on the other hand they have strong lobbies. It's hard to oversee them. I personally don't really believe that our policy makers are in the position to understand how these, the next steps of them work. Because if you regulate what they are now, tech companies tend to change very quickly and adapt to policies. I don't really believe that governments are going to solve that for us. In the light of that, are you optimistic? Do you see any sources of political and regulatory change both in Germany, here, Europe in general? Can you see, if it's going to happen, what will drive it? I'm certainly optimistic. I think it will be, and there are things happening. We are talking also to policy makers in Germany and others are. They do ask us, their queries. I think, for example, this thing with a hand sign application will soon vanish, hopefully. But I think it will be, after all, the major legislation will be second step. First we need pioneers of alternative business of platform co-ops that actually are successful and show that it works differently and that it can work differently. Then we can lobby, if you want so, to actually get the right policies. Given your need for scale and your need for reach, when it came to the UK, why did you do it as almost a franchise thing rather than just extend your own business? Well, it's about the whole idea. The whole idea is not to create another multinational co-operation. The idea is rather to create a multinational co-operative. It's not even franchise. There's a completely autonomous from on the UK co-operative that has been founded by people from the UK and they actually then decided to co-operate with us, so we got an agreement. It's really great that we have that. We have this example of two co-operatives working together, creating their own marketplace platform that will then be accessible to people in multiple countries and there are people from other countries now getting interested from Ireland but also around the world. I think if we manage to create this multinational co-operative owned by the users and employees in each country at the same time co-operating intensely, we have a very good chance to actually get them from below. What do you think finally are the chances of the real co-operative, the real sharing, the real horizontal and network economy? What do you see in five, ten years time? Are you hopeful? I'm very hopeful. Five, ten years is... I don't think... I think we have to rather think about up to even 20, 30 years but in five, ten years we have models getting such a... well, such a presence that actually people start thinking about it and more people join in so we can create that momentum and there's obviously the need. I mean, you wrote about climate change, about changing demographics. We need alternative ways to structure our economy and more and more people are going to feel it. We already see the political sites going crazy and I think we need these very specific answers that show us, okay, it can work differently. It's actually nice if it works differently. It's much more fun. It's great to work with Pomono or others. We had great talks in this morning to encourage us to understand how actually beautiful it can be to have an economy that's owned by the people and made for the people. So, yeah, I'm very optimistic. So brilliant. Thank you. Thank you.