A proposal for a citizen-owned social sharing platform

Still a ***DRAFT*** Please do not publish or share without asking for permission

After the hype on sharing economy, it is difficult to present any idea containing the words sharing and platform. It can be easily assumed that sharing is meant to be market transactions facilitated by a digital platform, where the platform is just a medium to extract value from these transactions between peers or from precarious labor. While the meaning of the word sharing has been deformed by Sillicon Valley newspeak, we miss out on an important phenomenon that keeps growing under the radar. More people are engaging in sharing as unconditional giving or lending, instead of “sharing” as short-term leasing of personal assets in exchange for money. This kind of sharing, although always present throughout history among communities, friends and family, has taken a new form in affluent cities with the advent of digital tools. Let me suggest a quick experiment: do a search for sharing groups on Facebook with the name of your city, combining it with keywords such as “sharing”, “donate”, “free” or any related term, in the city’s respective language. Chances are you will find an impressive number of groups and people participating in them. This does not take into account other tools being used beyond Facebook, like mailing groups and other local or national-oriented websites.

What might explain the growth in this kind of pratice? I don’t think it is often the case that people are always so giving to strangers, living by the philosophy of “sharing is caring”. Sometimes it is easier to just give stuff instead of throwing it away. The matter of fact is that materially abundant societies are drowning in “trash”, and what is trash for some is gold for others. There is a pile of stuff out there – bikes, furniture, home appliances and even food! – that are sistematically thrown away, but that may find their way and a second-life for another person who needs it. Whether you want to get rid of the comsumption sickness and spare the environment, or you want to act on goodwill, there is a drive for sharing in cities where there is this material overflow and people are interconnected. But despite this demand, there is no tool especifically built to make sharing easier on a bigger scale and to boost this growing gift economy. Why? One reason, I believe, is that there has not been any attractive business model to make out of it. But civil society and communities interested in sharing don’t actually need that. What we need is collaboration on the transnational level, to build a software that will answer social needs and cover the demands of existing sharing initiatives, and collaboration on the city level, to actually achieve the network effect that will bring sharing to the next level.

Yet another sharing platform?

The right question should be: how come there is no open-source multisharing platform yet? There are quite a few cases of success (depending on your metrics for success) out there when it comes to specific-purpose sharing. Couchsurfing became known among travelers to find and share a place to stay, or its younger spin-off, Trustroots, which emphasizes values that are closer to the ones expressed here. For sharing food, for instance, there is Foodsharing in Germany, which grew out of a grassroots movement for reducing food waste by sharing excess food. However, for (multi)sharing purposes most people are still using Facebook, which, needless to say, is not the optimal tool. Facebook is not designed for this purpose, it sells user’s data and has very low accountability. But even when other tools are used, like mailing-lists and other platforms, they are usually not open-sourced nor owned by the community of users (check out a list of them, and please contribute if you know of more!). Another issue with the latter is that they usually have a weak network effect, meaning that they do not have a sufficiently big number of users to make them useful as a place for sharing. Attracting users is obviously the holy grail of any social and sharing platform. In this proposal I want to address the challenge of designing an open-source tool that can be adopted and adapted by local communities, a task that also relates to the challenge of ownership and governance. Each of these challenges can be overcome by working within a collaborative paradigm. But first I will present the minimum features of the platform in order to make the idea more concrete in our minds.

Basic Features

There is no point in sketching out the feature in details, since they should be defined as part of a collaborative design process addressing user’s needs. However, the following minimum features can be the defining characteristic of this system:

1 - A simple classified ads, where one could offer and search by category, including geolocation and maps. 2- Basic communication, social and community features, such as chats, forum and sharing groups that can be created by users. 3 – One or more features to enable trust, which could take different forms, such as rating, points, references or degrees of connection between users (“who-knows-who”). 4 – A lending system, to make items searchable and available for lending under a certain period of time, keeping track of borrowed items and sending reminders to users.

Ideally, people would know that this platform is the place to go to find or to display items to give away or share/lend to the public or to trusted peers. But again, the aim of this proposal is merely to present the argument on how to make the design and development possible, in order to reach some of the basic goals that could be delivered by such a platform. These goals include making a more efficient use of material abundance by not commercializing it, while promoting a culture of less consumption and more sharing.

Freeshop.se is a nice map-based multisharing platform with a sleek design. It is a nice iniciative by one enthusiast in Sweden, but still needs to be open-sourced and to overcome some of the challenges pointed out in this text

Global development of software and local sharing dynamics

Like many of the free and open-source software that we use (often without knowing, because they form part of the basic infrastructure of the Internet), this platform for social sharing should also be a part of a knowledge commons, open and accessible to anyone to use, read, modify and distribute. Development of the basic features can take place on a global level, using a modular approach so that its features can be deployed and adapted locally by a city or community of users. However, the biggest challenge is not strictly technical. Most of the features already do exist in some way or another in different platforms, so we do not need to reinvent the wheel. The challege lies in the social process, to build collective agency - first to create a developer community, and second to attract users and people sharing at a local level. Building a great platform or technology does not guarantee automatically that people will be drawn to it and make use of it, especially in the case of social and sharing platforms where the real value lies in the content created by the users themselves. Therefore, creating a

strong user-base, preferably with the involvement of many actors, like municipal governments, civil society, activists, existing sharing initiatives and local businesses, is crucial to achieve the desired network effect. Cities at the forefront of sharing or with the support of progressive municipalities, like Barcelona, Amsterdam or Seoul, could be a testbed for this kind of platform. The city where I live and will focus my energies on, Gothenburg, has also the potential and the right environment to kickstart the development and testing of this platform. However, if this platform is deployed and controlled by a single actor – government, business or any particular organization – it is very unlikely that other actors will cooperate by using and promoting the use of the platform, which leads us to the next challenge of ownership and governance.

Citizen-owned: the challenge of ownership

When it comes to dealing with the question of ownership of digital infrastructures, there is a lot of enthusiasm over peer-to-peer architectures, where there is no server-client relationship and central point of accessing information. By now, technofiles readers have probably started thinking of (buzzword alert!) blockchain. Although I am personally sympathetic to these this kind of technology and its possible applications, in this particular case its application seems to be the equivalent of trying to boil water using a laser. The problem of governance is much easier to solve by political and sociological means than digital ones. For instance, the problem of platform ownership in the extractive “sharing economy” has been addressed by the idea and practices of platform cooperativism, which proposes a cooperative model of ownership and governance by workers and users of a digital platform, repaying them in a fairer way while providing a valuable service to a community.

What I propose is something similar to the democratic arrangement of platform cooperativism, but with the difference that our kind of sharing platform does not involve any business model that could pay for the operating costs of such a platform. This does not mean, however, that it would be economically unfeasible. Interested partners could form a foundation or non-profit that would seek donations to cover for the expenses of its maintance, which are relatively low relative to the social benefit it provides and number of active users (think of something like the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia, but having local iterations). The important thing is that actors involved in the local deployment and maintenance of the platform use the appropriate legal democratic forms at their disposal (foundations, non-profits or cooperatives) and keep its governance as open and democratic as possible for the users of this platform.

Getting started

This year’s OuiShare Fest was about the potential of cities as are the new beacon of resistance and the field of experimentation for new radical democratic politics. Cities are the place where power is reshuffled to the grasroots and where institutions are re-created to emulate the commons-based governance, beyond the state and market logics. If we want to transform the economies of our cities into more human economies that foster connections and relations of trust between people, while drastically reducing both waste and consumption, we also have to start building the appropriate digital infrastructure for it.

In a way, we have already begun the process. If you want to paticipate, you can help us first by answering this survey [link] about the features that you would like to see as a potential user, and also by joining the discussions at the Yunity slack (channel multisharing). Yunity is the network that first envisioned the idea of a multisharing platform. After the participatory design of the platform is over, we need to engage developers, seek some financing in our respective networks to support the work required, and engage local actors to test the development and adoption of the platform, as accounted for above in the local and global collaborative dynamics. There are good chances we can start this process next year, 2018, here in the city of Gothenburg, but this proposal is also a call for other cities, towns and communities to join in and participate in the development and deployment processes. The more actors involved in collaboratively building this citizen-owned sharing platform, the better!