 Lumio, so I'm telling a story from the beginning, but I wasn't part from the beginning. I came in coming out of Bated just to be clear about that Lumio is a worker owned co-op, so they were very clear when they formed it to be a worker owned co-op but it legally it's a LLC and it's based in New Zealand, so it's the first ever LLC worker owned co-op in New Zealand so one of the themes for us has been innovating and When we talked to advisors for privilege one over the other is the core question But rather what makes the most impact and in fact after the the break we will have some of both So we will see how that plays instead of 15 minutes. We will do 10 minutes break if you don't mind Alright I hardly use it, but I do have one Yay I think I'll leave that and if there's a strong need at the end you just say so and I could take one minute Just go on my account and show you a few things. Okay There's a hundred percent of every advisor we've ever talked to says we try to innovate in too many ways So, you know worker owned co-op based in New Zealand open source software So the founding story is that a bunch of people participated in Occupy in Wellington several of them were really taken by the process of Figuring out daily decisions and using the consent process of yes, no abstain and And For some of them it was a new experience and it was very powerful both in what worked well And what didn't work a couple were technologists Then who many of you have met came from collective intelligence. Some were designers several activists so a bunch of them came together and thought Most people won't ever come to a place So there must be a tool online that sort of capturing this process and at the time and spiral was sort of early stage forming It's a hub in Wellington that was started by a programmer to sort of do peer-to-peer Stuff the tagline is more people doing stuff that matters And so they went to in spiral and said we have this idea sort of thinking for you and They said we love the idea. We love the idea of having tools that help get peer-to-peer work done So we're happy to be your first customer. We're happy to help you you can base yourself here But you guys have to do it. So that was the founding of Lumio From the Beginning I think because they they appreciated having lots of different types of people and talent coming into the fold and in terms of the who It was a workaround crop But lot there was always a big circle around them of contributors volunteers sort of people Stepping into the circle Yeah Yeah, yeah, so we were at about five years now, so I'd say this was 2012 was the bulk of the forming So the original notion was people having a voice in decisions that affect them and So I know inclusion was one of the questions. I think fundamentally Lumio was about inclusion And there some of the core principles was that people will Work through agreement when they're in relationship. So it was a small group architecture That was always the core principle and to move from divergence to Through dialogue convergence dialogue in writing on this platform There was also a belief in transparency that transparency would lead to better decisions and increased accountability and I'd say Coming out of Arab Spring and Occupy There was a core belief that there was a need for tools that move people From talk to agreement for action. So there was always a bias towards action with Lumio So from the funding growth perspective for five years From the beginning it was bootstrapped and New Zealand is definitely a different context where you can sort of get away with Doing a lot with very little I'd say so there was friends and family to two early-stage Supports one was a small crowdfund to get started from volunteering completely to a little bit of Funding and then there was a friends and family loan. So those were the early stages very early on Wellington City government wanted to use it for a policy engagement as a test and they said We don't really know how to do this in terms of the outreach and how to facilitate Online so they contracted Lumio to do that work and early on the light bulb went off that we can make some money by Being in a consulting role and also it'll help us deeply get to know our customers So from fairly early on we've had some revenue from a consultation role About Two and a half years in we realized that the we really needed to to upgrade the product And we had a bias towards moving towards interoperability So we did a crowdfund campaign to support that work and I'd say from you know a tech startup perspective It really slowed us down. So, you know again, we were working very lean And it took us, you know a whole year or so to work on that that was about the same time that Podemos started and so we've been growing very slowly around the world Mostly by activists and all of a sudden we started seeing, you know dozens and then hundreds of groups in Spain Starting to form because the technologists that were part of the Podemos movement had identified Lumio as the sort of grassroots tool So by this point we were probably in about 50 countries And it's always been very horizontal organic growth Early on we saw that It was designed for activism that people were liking the tool. They were just taking it to work So early on we saw the opportunity to monetize the workplace and really different kinds of workplaces So from I'm gonna go back to the investment. I'll get back to users in a minute after that crowdfund we Wanted to say we've always gotten a little bit of philanthropic funding Foundations mostly in the US but a little bit globally as well came to us and primarily with projects and then we would get a Third party to put the money through but it's always we've always been questioning should we be a nonprofit Should we have also a nonprofit? So we've been having I'd say a three-year question about what's the right structure for us? And we decided we really needed to get a bigger round of investment always in the US people a hundred percent of people said we had to move to the US and And and you know not be a co-op so we've got So we ended up we just were so confused we didn't have the expertise to be honest So we just decided we can't afford to figure out coming to the US We stayed in New Zealand and we ended up figuring out a redeemable preference share So it was just trying it was Fudging trying to work it out and then we ended up Totally lucking out. We got a lead investor from South Korea and we raised about $480,000 at the end of 2015 and we had that money was our intention to validate our business model Some of the core questions I'd say the last couple of years as we've been moving towards that Attempt to validate business model have been US-based or not US-based non-profit or for-profit or some combination and From an investment stand equity or something different We've always had an inclination towards something different and we always get the feedback. We're trying to innovate in too many ways In terms of our users there have always been horizontal We think of our core user as entrepreneurs that people in all different backgrounds Activists NGOs collective partnerships small businesses certainly a lot of co-ops Government much more than we ever imagined at all levels including like major initiatives nationally in New Zealand And families use it for elder care and where to go on vacation We spent 2016 trying to validate the business model and we learned mostly what wasn't working And we've right now been hovering at about a hundred paid users The team for the last couple of years has been about 12 We've always had a circle of contributors and I'd say partners all over the world like you guys have been instrumental to our success We've focused a lot on being a different kind of organization, so we're a flat structure. We've never had a CEO We have self-managed teams. They're highly adaptive And we've open sourced that work as well at the meal that co-op Today in the end of December for this year. We decided with the resistance movements all over the world We would put a team on to Travel and focus on that so some of you were here Rich and Nanti have been in the US for about six weeks and we'll be heading to Europe soon They're sort of putting the focus on the resistance piece, but we decided that fundamentally Our product wasn't good enough. We were getting a lot of feedback from users and so Our runway is dwindling and we're using the limited resources to add a bundle of new features and a major focus on interoperability so that the People can find Lumia where they're at on slack on Facebook wherever they are We're at a point where we've cut the team in half I'd say we're close to survival like questioning about our survival We really believe in low slow growth. So we're trying to figure out. What will it take? To see if these new features are enough to get a user uptick to get a bigger influx of investment We still really believe that we're on to something Exciting, but we just we need to figure out how to stay alive at this point Any question Yeah, it's it's an instrument we have in the US but not used terribly widely that it it actually Feels like alone, but it but it doesn't show in the books like alone. So the investors have Pretty limited rights to be honest in the terms in our particular case Where that no one is on the board in five years There they there's a threshold to get a return only if we have the funds to pay them We put in a provision if we were making a bunch of money that at ten years We would raise that rate, but basically it's a it's a Instrument that's highly favorable to the venture We had a lead South Korean investor and we had investors from the US to Canada, New Zealand But 350,000 of us from a lead investor in South Korea Yeah, so we raised I think it was about 250 if I'm recalling from the rich from the second crowd fund And those were donations. I will say I didn't mention we have some had also some angel funding along the way just you know people giving us money without Any expectations us to do anything good work Did you send it to my room? Any day like we're in testing mode if anyone wants to be part of the testing work Really close to releasing it. What that feels like the big No, I need summer 2004 at Gmail. That was our gamble So again, my name is my name is Griff and I'm the learning lead at peer-to-peer University and happy to be here for me my interest is that For folks who are Interested in the pursuit of learning. I don't really see an alternative to the sorts of models that we're talking about I'm continued continually driven by quote from Yvonne Iluch already 45 years ago that technology is available to develop either independence and learning or bureaucracy and teaching and Much of what I've seen in education technology online in the last decade Leans much more towards bureaucracy and teaching than it does towards independence and learning of Our organization Really emerged out of open educational resources, which was a term that was coined in 2002 directly coming out of open source software initiatives For five years. I think this People were sort of figuring out. What does it mean? What does it mean now that creative commons exist to think about that in the context of education in 2007 many of our board members who are not our board members at the time because the organization did not exist We're vital in drafting the open education declaration Which started to think about openness and education not just in terms of licensing but also in terms of pedagogy and public funding and You know the rest of it PDPU Emerged as a grassroots project out of this of this conference and was incorporated as a 501c3 two years later in 2011 PDPU's work has always been focused on peer learning online and really Developing open-source tools supporting learning communities that are aligned with values of collaborative work peer learning a community And I would say that you know in 2012 and 13 a question came up of you know, what do we do now that these huge? multimillion dollar funded projects have you know, they've sort of taken the language of openness They've taken the currency of online learning and they've they've sort of put this back into a hierarchical structure many of the you know The mass open online course providers Who sort of were viewed as our competition at the time we're doing that and we were a four-person non-profit organization? So there was a question as to what's the role of an organization like PDPU in this we had Thousands of volunteers people were developing courses You know you could sign up to take a course or build a course and that was very much the vibe of the organization I joined in early 2015 explicitly to start a new project which has now become The fundamental work that we do it's called learning circles And these are basically study groups for people who want to take online courses together And so rather than developing new open educational resources We're focused on partnering with public libraries community centers adult education centers Universities around the world to help disseminate online learning to to wider audiences Just to give a sense of what learning circles looks like right at this moment Well anyway Screens of it now, but you can see them in in You know in Chicago, Illinois, there's a group that's meeting for seven weeks working through a fiction writing online course together And in Detroit there's folks working through a social entrepreneurship 101 course And these are all facilitated by librarians by volunteers. We do some training up front But one thing that I can say out of the work that started with Chicago is that not only our retention rates for online courses In learning circles more than 50 percent, but about 65 percent of the people we work with their first-time online learners So this is not a normal community of people who are going online and thinking about how they can remix educational tools for You know for their own learning. So that's something that I'm very proud of News compare that to rates across the space 50% Yeah, can you I just trying to go to the next slide, but I'm so doomed in I can't Yeah, so as an organization as I said, we're 501c3 we're a distributed organization. They're currently like three and a half of us We have an eight-person board of directors around the world. We have an executive director only in writing We are we have traditional nonprofit bylaws, but for four years. We've been trying, you know open governance, which I Think we go back and forth on whether that's the term we want to use since open Doesn't really mean anything or it means I mean just means whatever you want it to mean But essentially what that means is that the team is in charge of you know, not only all strategic direction, you know in between board meetings, but also running governance issues from HR to You know bringing on new service providers, you know, so everything so on a weekly basis We have a team check and call that's open to anybody We have a work in progress call governance call and then we have community calls on a monthly basis with you know Learners facilitators and we have a subcommittee of our most active board members who helps us set salaries do things like this that things That an executive director would normally do all of our governance guidelines from travel to the board bylaws are online So you can look at those or I can share them later and everything that we do is openly licensed So in the last two years, we have been a 100% grant funded organization before I joined and that had I think burned us a little bit A few times and so there was a focus on developing learning circles in a way that would not just be a grant funded project But could actually really turn into a viable business that was aligned with our values And in the last two years you can see that we've grown from working with one librarian in Chicago To now working with about 40 different cities with 12 organizers who are people who have full-time jobs as directors of learning and advancement at Libraries or their ed tech professors at universities but people who are really advocating for our work in their neighborhoods We've worked with almost 180 facilitators using 70 different online courses most of which P2P has not built We've reached over about 1200 people now and in addition We've seen the emergence of an online community of about 75 people who are now actively involved in not just How do I facilitate a better learning circle? But how does P2P as an organization work better for me and just last month a woman Published her dissertation about our work after we had given her access to everything that we did and she moved to Chicago for two months And we've done this all with a smaller staff than we had when we were grant funded So thinking back I was thinking last night about what what allowed this project to grow I think quite successfully in the last two years I think starting with a community that needed this and really working closely offline with Chicago public library And if they were if the librarians were going to be our initial set of stakeholders making sure that this was designed with them Always viewing volunteer-based facilitation So, you know keeping us honest along the way about if people don't want to opt into running a learning circle We need to know that It's a bit of a little cliche, but you know always thinking of technology as a tool and never a solution Prototyping things offline for a number of months before we decide to commit anything to code Inviting participation at all levels is something that I think is vital in education of giving learners the opportunity to feel like they can Facilitate they can develop a course in Detroit. We had two Women who came in to take an entrepreneurship course and they're now facilitating that in their library We have people in Kansas City who took an intro to web design course who are now Contributing to an open course and so folks who you know I think just when you say you need to care about openness. You need to care about CC You need to care about these things like that they don't but if you you know if you can Create an environment where people benefit from that. I think we see a lot of folks really opting into that I think you know we view our roles, you know carrying a flag that is going to resonate with practical practitioners But like I was just saying recognizing that not everybody who benefits from our work needs to know who we are Yeah, and as I said like this project began as a way to better deliver MOOCs And I think it's really morphed into a way of empowering patrons and librarians to be better designing their programs and to do things for adults that Are often relegated to K through 12 or just put online and assume that people can just find it if they want it About a year and a half ago when the learning circles were starting The Ashoka Foundation invited us into their globalizer process Which was to put out like a three-year strategy of growth and what we identified was strategic partnerships targeted consulting and Leading to the open learning revolution as I said, we were totally grant funded before but now This year and last year about 25% of our revenues come from consulting with the goal of about 40% last year 40% next year rather and then finally I thought I would just sort of throw out a few questions or ideas or tensions that I've been having on For discussion later. So with regards to the partnerships. So right now 33% of our revenue is going to non-team members and so this is money that's passing through us to Support you know give stipends for libraries or to pay evaluators or to grow programs And I think there's a huge missed opportunity as we think of you know as we're trying to fit in these distinctions of team non-team employee contractor Project team member like I feel like we lack the language sometimes to actually really maximize Audience and it's weird especially when we're working with public institutions that have very set views of Hierarchy and you know, I can only wear my one hat at a time It's a little tricky to sometimes feel like we can build a movement That can that can sort of blend across institutions, but that's what we're trying to do The consulting all of our consulting work is geared to minimize people's dependency on PDPU not maximize their dependency So we're running facilitator training workshops helping folks develop online courses to fill gaps that they've identified We're you know doing custom feature implementation But there is a bit of a curse of a service provider Which is that the more that the more that we act like a service provider the more that people think we're a service provider And I think with that can come a language of saying well We're doing this for PDPU or PDPU is doing this for us rather than you know We're trying to grow a program that works Together and then just sort of finally with this sort of revolution of what we want like we do not want to be a huge Organization all of our partnerships are now being essentially spun off where as we train folks in we're training folks in with the Kenyan National Library Service right now, and it's not just to make them facilitators It's to make them advocates so that they can be the ones doing the trainings and Tanzania and Uganda down the road But then alongside of that we need to think okay if all these programs are working well without PDPU What's our role, and I think the thing that we've been thinking a lot about recently is first You know what are people used to paying for that we might replace and so at libraries You know paying for access to closed content is a huge thing that libraries are paying tens of thousands of dollars of And I think in the medium term There's a maybe a transition away from paying the content to using OER and paying to support more engaging equitable learning experiences and then secondly I think a lot of the platforms that we're discussing today You get involved in some sort of language of what it is to be a public good And I imagine the work that PDPU does potentially being funded on a municipal level going forward. So stop there I have a question on the it would be great if You could break down the flow of funds to people And compare the what they receive compared to kind of living wages standards Because a lot of the three presentations we've seen one of the anxieties that I have about this platform movement is Can you live off it? Can your society live off it and the revenue streams are allocated to resources Can you kind of dissect how that happens is how that does that compare to you know The next best job Do you want me to answer that now? Yes, so when I made the distinction between team and non-team my anxiety is that as a team We have an open salary model where everyone knows each other salary We have a form we have a basically spreadsheet that we update each year And we feel we all feel good about that but again, that's only for team members And so when we work on a project with Detroit Public Library or the Kenyan National Library Service or University in Paris It's still up to them how they want to spend that money And if we're not making somebody a team member and saying you're a full-time employee of PDPU There's some level of you know We don't have that we don't have as much control over where that goes And this is a quite I think this is the sort of question that I'm asking is like when we engage in partnerships Like right now We found folks who are aligned with our work And so the people who are facilitating 80% of them are full-time librarians or they're full-time educators And so they have full-time jobs wherever they live and PDPU is just a mechanism for them to do the work that they want to be doing if We do have some volunteer facilitators and we have folks who find our tools online and start facilitating We don't pay I mean we don't pay anyone anything for that And so it's really only through partnerships that we start seeing that sort of clash But I think we have three projects right now in Chicago Nairobi in Paris where we have organizers who have a full-time job at a library or a university But PDPU is a big part of their identity as an employee And I think it's a very much an open question is what do we offer those people in the long run? How do we think about our team in a way? That's more than just the three and a half people who get PDPU paycheck each month And I think that's a bit of an open question That's a very good question In some sense the question is PDPU is basically a peer-production project with a core support team that is like the Wikimedia Foundation to Wikipedia thinking of PDPU as a platform co-op as opposed to a peer-production enterprise with small group Inside it's trying to find ways to sustain itself. Maybe I'm just not sure whether the scaling collaborative interesting side of PDPU is the way in which the three and a half people Manage there to keep audience all together As opposed to how you actually create open learning circles and an educational system out of your production model It's purely that's basically voluntary and Social fine and fascinating and interesting, but it's it's the challenges you raise Don't seem to be of the kind that's driving the peer Platform cooperative in question is how do you get some? large-ish number of people whether within an organization or across a network to be able to make a living of Distributed production Not so much Good morning everyone Morning, so I'm sitting here wondering how I got here Degree and it was it involved a meeting with Yo-ha and who put us together Yo-ha in the first place. Do you remember? Steve Dawson, okay good Wonderful and that's blame anyone blame Mary, but you really you should blame me. Well, that's that's actually That's very good credit anyone credit Mary very good. Anyone blame me Good. Well, this that actually has something to do with I'll get around to this case behind me in a minute Which Steve was very much involved in I was involved in So I think Trying to figure out how I could be useful to you Good people here my my sort of view of the field in this work It is as a practitioner who's been advising companies and doing this and it's it's a it's a good deal more bricks and mortar than Collaborative networks, I mean I've been actually just advising companies in various ways And there might but there might be some lessons that are of interest to you and and a couple of quick anecdotes I can tell That may be provocative Let me Start by Using a framework from a course I teach in trying to sort of paint the picture the big picture of what This field is about where it came from in some sense and and and it's it's various kind of component parts In trying to think about that I some time ago came up with a sort of a scheme of four verbs Four key verbs of worker ownership Take start negotiate and buy So in terms of like, you know, where do where these ideas come from? How are they being used particularly, you know in the current moment? I mean a lot of people have been drawn to this work in recent years and it's very inspiring and great by the courageous acts of workers in Argentina in particular around the recuperated factories movement the That took place actually at the end of the millennium in the beginning of the the next millennium this one where workers occupied factories and and people said oh my goodness look at this is possible that they could do this and With very little management or maybe some not management at all as bricks and mortar and some of those businesses quite well many of them failed but there is some sort of a Footprint there about what's possible? I would not say that's the most generalizable way to build a movement To think that we're gonna take over but that sometimes happens history sometimes serves that up and you do the best You can't the second verb of to start is closest to the discussion in here where people have for variety of Value reasons historical reasons are looking for alternative to the standard capitalist model the standard extractive model or whatever and that's a That's a motivation that's existed for centuries. These ideas are old They arguably I could take you back to hunter-gatherers, but let's just deal with Robert Owen and the Roachdale pioneers who started the cooperatives in the UK That inspired a lot of people in the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain up into the 20th century and others These ideas have been around people have imagined that it's possible to start companies in some some kind of a democratic basis And so they've done it and they've done it with varying degrees of success depending upon facts and circumstances historical facts and circumstances that they've faced and I'll come back to that the third verb is to negotiate and There I'm talking about a kind of a rare case, but grabs a lot of headlines when it happens of Collectively bargained Negotiated ownership positions where unions have taken ownership positions in exchange usually for contract concessions in very large companies it happened at United Airlines in the late 1990s Where the employees owned 55% of that very large company and had board seats and I was involved in that and Advising unions and and the company there and talk about it. It happened in the steel industry before in the 70s and 80s Arguably a sort of a certain revival of the work ownership idea in the 20th century came around people trying to help workers And this is a kind of a cousin to the to the recuperative factories movement But in the 70s and 80s here in the United States My colleagues and I were helping workers try to buy companies for by companies that were otherwise closing and trying to figure out What could be done there? That often happened because unions were in place and could represent the workers and some kind of plan Alternative plan could be could be generated They were very interested the most interesting stuff in that third verb. I would say that ever happened That needs to be brought back happened in the UK And happened with the Greater London Enterprise Board and it happened With a guy named Mike Lucas of Lucas Aerospace and it was tied into a Plan of doing conversions of the defense industry to peacetime purposes. It was just an amazingly far-sighted and inspiring example that didn't get too far off the ground, but again, the ideas are out there and then the fourth verb is to buy and that's That's where I spend most of my time and that's about conversions of established companies That are up and going where for one reason or another usually having to do with the founders having reached retirement age and wanting to cash out there's an opportunity for workers to be able to buy these companies and The predominant legal structure for use it for implementing that is not a cooperative. It's an employee stock ownership plan It can be done through cooperatives And we could talk about that And for the record Yeah, I'm I may I prefer cooperatives to employees stock ownership plans for a variety of reasons I can get into I've written a fair amount about this But I am also in the real world and I want to put up real numbers and show how this stuff can scale and and that's why I spend most of my time with companies like Harpoon Brewing Company here in Boston, you know Where the employees bought quote have bought an initial stake and will are on their way to 100% ownership of that company So those are those are like four verbs of how this is done take start negotiated by and I think for the purposes of This discussion I should just you know try to Share some thoughts about that's the start space and I also want to recognize Maggie Cohn in the room who came in late from corporate funding to England who's another a pioneer And in this space who knows a lot and and I've also been doing a little work with Jason of late since there's interest here in Massachusetts news ideas There are some challenges that those of you who want to promote this idea We've already heard a little bit about them. There's some very particular challenges of how To reward entrepreneurs. Let's put that one out on the table, you know people who? Who start something and who put in a disproportionate amount of labor to make something happen? and And perhaps after lots of blood sweat and tears that it may be one person it may be five people it may be ten people they get something going and along comes the second third generation of workers who come in as owners and Are coming in at a competitive wage scale and you know and those and those founders Entrepreneurs have have got some feelings and some some needs that at least have to be thought about it How do you deal with? How do you deal with that sort of process in this kind of environment? I have a couple thoughts about that Another related point to that Is risk capital is That is that any capital that's going to help you get started in the early stages is risk capital That will expect a high interest rate because of the risk involved There are not that many sources who are friendly to startups in this space. There are some Corporate fund is is one of them and so Maggie should speak to that and And then there's there's a sort of an issue of structure and This this gets into a little bit of legal legal distinctions that I'm not a lawyer. I'm a management consultant social psychologists by training really but but the I think I would just say that my Sort of preferred structure of the ones I've seen around cooperative startups Is a two classes of share model Where a shares are membership shares that are are owned and governed by the natural persons We're going to work in a company and B shares are non-voting shares That are investor shares where people supplied with all the all the appropriate documentation of the risks they're facing are in effect Lending money to the company because they're they don't have pause they don't and I don't think they should have positive voting control if they if they want that they can go elsewhere and The I got two minutes. So the the best example of that right now that I know of a little bit is The favorite company is democracy brewing It's in Boston here. It's a startup. That's with some people out of the labor movement who are are interested in this model and and are doing a fund raise and and I'm helping them out a little bit let's see so a Couple of other Things the structural things so I said two classes of shares there are Maybe two more semi technical points that One of them the first one comes out of Mondragon and and I think it's one of the most important things The Mondragon has taught us Is to be able to separate the membership function of a share from the net worth carrying function of a share a There is a problem of what are called mule cooperatives that That literally only last a generation because they can't reproduce and there's a trap There's a simp. There's a tragedy that has happened It happened most recently in the 20th century with the plywood cooperatives in the Northwest Where because because the membership function of a share was not separated from the net worth function of a share when the firm Did very well the shares rose in value made it impossible for new workers to buy in the co-op was dissolved as a result How Mondragon solved that and how my colleagues at the industrial cooperative Association where I started in 1977 Help solve that is is helping design a system of what are called internal capital accounts individual internal capital accounts where at where 70% let's say of the profit should go at the end of the year and a collective reserve where 30% of the profit should go and where the where the membership share should be established by some some kind of invention some kind of analysis that should be more of a other sort of a Gut-checked you know are people serious about wanting to be able to come in is two three months worth of of Salary something like that that can be paid out of payroll deduction and where the price is just a fun Is just rising with inflation and is not rising with the performance of the firm So that that little bit of tech of sort legal technology is important a third thing I guess is something you might consider of a startup losses account to go back to The issue of how do you reward the entrepreneurs and the first generation of people who do this is that you might keep track of? For some period of time three years I don't whatever whatever it is of the early losses of a company and Have that as a debt to that the company has to pay back to the founders over time So it's a little bit of a repayment of the blood, sweat and tears of the of the early years Finally, I've got 30 seconds on the ideological side, and this is a friendly pushback to Yochai's kickoff about this being about social production versus market production My interest politically in the frame I prefer and talking about this work is economic democracy. That's what I'm interested in I think it's not it's been That's not socialism. That's not Marxism. That's economic democracy, and I'm not saying that's what Yochai said But I do want to specify that I actually don't think that the market is the enemy here I think it's the employment relationship that we have in the capitalism of where You know owner's own and everybody else works for them It's a it's a it's the master-servant relationship out of feudalism that is Reproduced through capitalism and it it's reproduced because of power and and and accumulated power Not necessarily because of the market. I think the market is is an okay mechanism to determine whether something's working or not and And I'm and I'm for the division of a labor-managed market economy Regulated by a political state because even worker-owned firms will do bad things So you want to have a state that can can say no But you want to have firms that they'd say yes, so Thank you. I mean Okay, there are a lot of nice hands. We have only time for one question. So Well It's a sort of because I believe that the firm Should be a democratic social institution and not a piece of property of the firm should be a democratic social institution that owns property that has these internal capital accounts I talked about for example and one of the challenges of doing the work I do in ESOPs is is what if if you're still in that property scheme and you're regulated by the laws that we have to live with with ESOPs which are our Employee benefit laws and security laws We're vulnerable to takeovers, but by people coming in offering a higher price to the trustee for what a company is worth and Where by virtue of the laws we have to at least deliberate and and Respect whether we should cash out the employee ownership because somebody's come along and offered to X of what we're worth There are ways of dealing with that somewhat with the B corporation Idea as as a kind of a firewall and there are other things you can do but with a with a with a cooperative it's It's a lot harder to take it over The problem is that is that a cooperative is a lot harder to sort of scale up and sell if for if you're trying to Capture a major part of the market of Privately-held businesses that baby boomers are selling out of these days that are at 50 to 500 million dollars in sales Those are those are like the scale big companies that I'm interested in and making a dent in and I'm interested in Our fund our American working capital fund being competing with private equity to be able to back employees To be able to buy those firms. That's very hard to do with a cooperative structure. It's not impossible Thanks a lot. We have My oh now From Barcelona Okay, I'm going to present what we have been doing in Barcelona with a Barcelona collaborative economy plan you have to think about a framework in which the government of the city council Is mainly The context of a party that was started from the end of mobilization that actually is calling Barcelona common So it's a citizens candidate to very much inspired by the commons bringing the commons into the political institutions So this is the framework, which is very very favorable Because many principles In which we are developing this There are two guidelines that inspired what we have been doing first one is Collaborative politics for a collaborative economy. I will explain further what this means Second commons oriented collaborative economy might be the most the better model for the city and we frame it as commons collaborative economy because There is a matter of Strategies as been there has to be in terms of we are thinking about an strategy that's very focused into Entering to market oriented sustainability models and ensuring Generation of income or generation of work that's a strategy another strategy might be assuring access to a common resource there are different also a strategy of funding by Public funding or research fund like there are different strategies In which we can enter to think about but there is also an element of how you frame it In order to For example in our case use windows of political opportunity in this moment at the European Commission level There is the debate about the European agenda of collaborative economy And for us it's very good to frame it as collaborative economy because then we are invited into places that we wouldn't be The commons is considered economy now for teaching groups, which for us is like a winning No, so just distinguishing this element of the frame and when we are talking in the framework of the Network of social economy and cooperatives economy in Catalonia. We might be talking about open cooperatives So also regarding the framework you have to So the plan of collaborative economy is being developed by the Commission of social and solidarity economy So it's in the framework of which Try to promote Alternative modalities of economy In Barcelona from 8 to 10 percent of the GDP are based on cooperatives and social economy. So it's not something 10 percent is not 30% like in Bologna, but it's not a minor part. And so we are thinking how far different trajectories of socio-economical innovation might help us to scale these from the 10 percent to a 30 percent after two Monday, let's hope this And but we are recognizing also like the caring economy the green economy like others in this ecosystem of different sources of transformation research done by Manuel Castells actually Show how far in the context of Barcelona after the 2008 crisis there has been an increase of alternative economic In many not only so what we have been doing is specifically like going directly to point of things specific actions that we have been doing So specific section to support for most collaborative economy We have given a lot of important to increase awareness because there is a lack of awareness of the mother That's about when you ask the cases also So we have been organizing meeting also facilitating the connection between the digital commons movement with the cooperatives movement also going to more to first start up kind of modalities of festivals also support them for contaminate and Make arrive this type of more commons related modality to start that type of Entrepreneurs and we have been also trying to see of the approach of very big events happening in Barcelona like the smart city Congress the Worldwide largest Congress of smart city technology or the mobile world Congress those are organized by the city council So we actually have a position to reshape the agenda, but we are doing it not in a Disruptive manner that kind of in a progressive and I go building constructive manner to actually deal with these spaces second funding the lack of Funding it's a very very Problem in the sector. So in this we have we are providing a program of much funding. We think that a project get The funding for from the city council depending on what has raised in a crowdfunding campaign so Second we have the spirit we have a project European for experimenting basic income that we are going to be Neighborhood allows also the introduction of a local currency and we are seeing how these two elements might Make see the growth or bad benefit the commons collaborative economy We don't know that it's going to happen, but let's see We are also as part of the urban development expansion. We are promoting a set of like Bob and Makers spaces in different neighborhoods to distribute to the city We have formation entrepreneurs programs and And the program of la comunificadora, which we support the 15 new initiatives. It was not difficult to find them We have much more demand that what we could actually respond and we are building a specific incubator building for But last We see commons collaborative economy as a possibility of of an alternative to privatization So what we are revising the way to increase the public procurement being happening in order to allow that actually This kind of economy can go into the goals of public procurement, which currently it doesn't because how it's done Analyze and also Pilot to see how to make collaborative public services Incorporating for example within it is a wireless community Network into the system, but it's really really difficult because regular regulation is the main Glass ceiling of the commons collaborative economy. So like really not allowing many of the things that we would be doing We have also a recycling Infrastructure a neutralized infrastructure from putting in collaborative use like computers Regarding the house is not only how what you do, but how do you do it in these terms? We have moved from a policy perspective We have moved from a top down expert base Consultancy framework to be in an ecosystem for the policy co-creation for many reasons I'm not going to explain it but but also for being effective notice not that on a matter of you participate It but for effectiveness because many of the streets are outside on the So we have been with the relationship with stakeholders and also partnership with research in terms of a relationship with the stakeholders I'm not going to detail, but we have like four layers of participation from a platform visit a platform We're participating to a meet up that's mostly meet up and an annual Public policy forum event that I hope I will come in the next one in which we develop this kind of co-creation Methodologies, and we have a barcola which is a working group between the city council and 25 representatives of the commons collaborative economy in the city the last layer is Transversal group inside of the city council for allow internal coordination We also very very important. We have been A relationship and my partnership with research because many this model is unknown has not been very much research And there are many solutions that need really co-designed. So in this sense There's the partnership with my research group. We also For the benefit and There are four projects that are providing funding But it's not only a matter of funding and bringing like millions of you know for doing this But also it's a matter of building a framework in which you can experiment because inside of the city council There are many things you cannot do you cannot like Organize things in that doesn't follow the structure. So these projects allow you to do pilots experimentation and show also sometimes even Skip the regulation limitation Very important we have been through the research Specifying what actually Differencing the commons collaborative economy in regard to the unicorn No, I will not explain it to this audience But mainly is the type of economical enterprise more democratic The type of technology being based on free software and the type of data And this is very very important to us and we are building a tool for actually allowing what we call it the commons balance Like a balance of how commons oriented is an initiative also a unicorn modality of initiative Because this is very important for us because when we implement the policies and we want to support the commons collaborative economy in the Program, for example, we need clear criteria for distinguishing the models. And so we are building this as Indicators connected to five of the dimensions that for us it represents the common balance regarding the the type of economical Model financial model This is a responsibility how far they have included policies and environmental impact the technological policy the knowledge policy and the We have Mappet the collaborative economy in the city. We have identified one thousand cases You have to say to have present that half of the cases fifty percent of the cases are not platforms Things that provide support to the product. So they they develop technologies. There are spaces. They they provide Educational training and that's something very characteristic of them That it needs a lot of ecosystem elements in order to the platform's cases actually work the other element Is that any Perhaps two or three but most of the cases don't fulfill or commons balance criteria And like you don't expect that the cases are going to be in everything But maybe good at some parts of the start and not at the others Just three models of Other thing is don't think about commons collaborative economy as a uniform model but more like Inside areas or modalities. This is one one another source, you know This is one soul that is what we call we are Cooperatives that are all of them are cooperatives that are named we are energy. We are communication We are mobility. So this one's provide collaborative consumption of Ecological cars and Motorcycles this one's about collaborative construction and production for energy Which is being integrated into the energy policy of the city council This is about communication policies of all of them regard to different sectors and change it the model of production on construction and all of them are naming we are because It's it's connected to the idea of economical sovereignty in a context of a large political sovereignty Frame of the other one is freelance Mutualization cops as might be with 90,000 people in Belgium These are freelance getting together through a platform in order to mutualize their services and support each other and the last one is Spinos cops spin-off from institutions of a spin-off from universities and frequent a spin-off from city council or from administration Or what we got not the spin-off from from big cops, but actually what we call a Platforming station of big corporation big corporation like like Abacus that have one million members that they start to think about how to bring their services into platform modality in order to survive I just to finish to invite you to the performance event in in June and then in November in the city Congress and an encounter we will be doing about competitive innovation with What time for a very good question Opportunities coming up in a specific sector. It sounds like you have different sectors where you see this kind of organization but do you Go out and try to recruit to develop offerings within sectors that aren't To build out the Or do you wait to see what so the element that we have but color this working group that is city council and 25 representative that is keep growing and It's a way of getting to know very well the sector. So it's not that what is there? What do we do? It's actually you have a very very important representation of it thinking with you and so identifying opportunities Identifying necessities for a consolidated case to actually get internationalized. We have local cases to get internationalized with international And relationship. So I think that's that's really useful. I would say not only like Participating but very useful in terms of I'll be quick since I'm last everybody wants to get coffee So my name is Jason. He wants to get I work at the mayor's office I'm in the city of Boston and my main project has been working on the city's worker cooperative initiative or what would be more accurately called the Initiative to support employee ownership and worker co-ops in the city of Boston I started about 10 months ago and the National League of Cities equitable economic development fellowship started 10 months ago So the city of Boston is one of six cities across the country that are working with the National League of Cities to develop an initiative to promote equitable economic development and We stood before I came on to the city They started with the premise that Boston is one of the most economically unequal cities in the United States By some measure it is the most unequal and and we decided for a variety of reasons that Exploring ways to promote employee ownership and the development of workers would be an interesting and fruitful way to go to the image Continue so I'll start with this quote from Mayor Walsh at the 2017 state of the city address I was talking about small business for the census We built Boston's first city-wide system of small business support as a small business plan And we're encouraging work around cooperatives He also recently I've been thank you people in the room spoke at events This is the last couple weeks the mayor one was at the Dorchester food court Maggie was there talked about How cooperatives can promote equality and talk about the city at large and then last week He gave a speech at Harpoon Brewery at their Harpoon Fest The 250 employees about the potential of employee ownership to reduce Inequality, I think for making that connection to Dan Canary So he has he has more and more been talking about this. He actually just last week published an article in the Boston Business Journal In support of employee ownership to talk mostly about he stops in the article So the mayor is talking about it. It's become One of the key initiatives in the office of economic development So the fellows are our Joyce Lenahan who's the chief of policy Very important person in the city and my boss Trin Lynn the director of the office of workforce development does great work Especially with the unions in the city if you know building pathways And operation exit they pair at risk or formally in prison young people with with unions with the trades They have look at 90% success rate But it's it's really great program and then John Smith who works in the opposite economic development And then I have come in I'm sort of an honorary fellow And I've helped complete the work So I talked about this this work we're kind of seeing this at the nexus of the mayor's efforts to reduce economic inequality and Increased upward economic mobility and to support small businesses So we've we've the city Might be able to announce soon an economic mobility lab But in the very case that the mayor has made that more and more of a priority And then the small business plan supporting small businesses that's been Key for him as well. So we've kind of aimed to put this work in that context So I focused mostly on the office of small business development in the city because they have existing resources that we could Build in to support Work what this is all I'll skip this isn't it's interesting crowd because usually I have to go through a definition of what a worker Cooperative and for the ownership part, but I'll skip I'll skip through that So so the initiative so far has this focus on incorporating co-op specific and employee ownership specific Programming and assistance in the pre-existing city programs So the office of small business does on-site technical assistance will pay for that It has some loan programs that target low-income and minority communities So we were just thinking of ways to incorporate support for cooperative businesses Into those existing structures We've assembled practitioners like Chris and Maggie a bunch of others in the area And convene discussions around the different challenges that co-ops employee on companies face in the area So a few months ago the city announced that it hired to Employee ownership and co-op ownership focus technical assistance providers and its on-site TA program So previously if a worker co-op or an aspiring worker co-op or an employee on firm had an issue that was specific to that model They really had nowhere to go in the city now We're already in talks with a few They come to the city work with the small business team if we have the resources and the time and the expertise and most cases now We will Prepare them with the on-site TA provider and the city pays for that service So especially for smaller startup firms like our gesture food co-op That could be a big deal It could also be used for business and interest in converting to employee ownership whether to a worker co-op or to an ESOP We actually hope to have a meeting with a business owner next week about kick-starting that process So we're already seeing some movement in that direction So to use Chris's framework. We're focusing on starting and buying That's a much this is not going to take over businesses Maybe we'll get there We're also doing a co-op workshop series Kind of a few to kick off. I think I think you sent out the email Earlier this week This has changed so we're doing kind of two general ones With the general public for business support organizations for anybody interested in cooperative and employee ownership I also hope to plug in some of some worker co-ops in the city to the technical assistance at this event So they'll know about these structures But they could learn some things that get plugged into the VA. So we're having one next Wednesday at May 30 May 31st 10 a.m. To noon at the bowling building the Roxbury Innovation Center We'll have some to the Main Street's directors throughout the city, but the Main Street's program We also have some CDC folks Community Development Corporation folks there and Come and fight and fight other people Event bride should be up soon for that and there's one June 22nd to and that one We're targeting more towards business owners one because there's a lot more time. We have four weeks And so basically Also the city's Should be announcing fairly soon the opening of the small business center There's a one-stop shop for any business owner to come and say I you know Even if the city doesn't have resources to fix their particular problem. They can That city can point them in the right direction within that depending on how much support and Energy is around the employee ownership stuff that could have something like an employee ownership division Which would likely be one person who could serve that function for any business Verding to or starting as a worker co-op or an employee procurement personal mission procurement Early this year. We had the first worker co-op. We believe certify as a business with a small I think that small woman owned business in the city of Boston. That's lower homes from Sarah the commercial composting company We hope to get some more registered with the city and because procurement is a big messy thing You know, we haven't had any any grand solutions to that but we were committed to continue to working on Ways to incorporate employee owned and work around companies in the city's contract And and that that could there's there's one idea that's come That's just kind of this huge grand strategy and there are other smaller ones We can do within that even if it's just making sure that on the listserv that I have of Employee owned companies they get the information for the workshops because they haven't been included in many of those That's a wide range and then the press so the mayor speaking at these events is a big deal And then for those who don't know Boston's a strong mayor system. So the mayor has a lot of power The city council The city council Has a lot of power as well But but my and so I've been told by the sustainable economy's law center and others who specialize in the space that What Boston is doing is unique in that it's coming out of a mayor's office and many other cities folks are kind of Going the activist room through city council trying to pass different ordinances like in Oakland That has happened here as well but this is in Concert with the local efforts and the experts in the field This is coming out of the mayor's office and betting in the existing programs It's also been Co-operative mentioned and I mentioned Boston 2030 draft document. We're just coming up next month the final version We'll have we'll have an employee or ship we get some point And we're also thinking about workforce development. This is very this is also very early stages The lowest lift for this is making sure that worker co-ops and employee owned companies Have access to existing grants and programs in OWD Because there's you know, many of them would would get these grants based on their qualifications No matter connecting them. The other thing is about is using the model of a worker cooperative or trying to think creatively about how to use that to promote upward economic mobility to help with reentry for Or Only cars for a young people and so I will also have some form of advisory council Be frank. This has been slowed down a little bit But I think I'll make it a more informal working group and then We'll eventually move towards a more formal advisory council that will study a bunch of issues because I mean essentially the legwork on this project has just been me and a few hours a week of my Colleagues who are very very busy people So there are a bunch of other issues that I don't know or don't have the time to look into and we could use the experts in the field to dig Into a bunch of whether it's permitting More procurement more detailed procurement stuff, etc. So the group of smart people no employee ownership to delt in these issues So we are super late, but like one very brief question. I'm very brief answer, please Question the city this is amazing work the city does a number of initiatives to support Startups in tech space. There's like incubator programs and so on and so forth Is there any possibility to or is that something you've talked about connecting with those so that? Cooperatives and other forms of work or ownership are on the table In that start-up tech sector space in addition to all the amazing work you've done, which you were in the brick-and-mortar small and medium-sized firms So we're I think we're moving more in that direction. I see every female. So there's one One idea someone's floated this there's a loan fund in the city. I haven't looked at the details I just got the two-page memo, but it was This $400,000 loan fund in the city that's dedicated for tech startups And this person proposed some model where you would at the very least alert the People in the startup of this model or at most and I don't know the legal issues or the political issues around this but at most you would For I don't want to say force, but in effect force them to become by giving them alone Some form of Employee-owned company. I don't know what that looks like or if there's a way to structure incentive So you don't have to force anybody to do anything they choose this voluntarily But in short like we're beginning to think through some of those issues in the tech space