The Commons Transition Coalition presents:

Sharing Value & Ownership for the Common Good: Building the Commons Economy

Featuring special guest Nathan Schneider (USA)

Venue: Church of All Nations (CAN), 180 Palmerston St, Carlton.

Date: Friday 10th June 2-5pm

Cost: $15 Full / $10 Concession/Student/Unwaged

NOTE: Attendees of the Platform Cooperativism – How to make the 'Uber' economy work for people seminar are able to attend this workshop at no cost (please bring along your ticket from that event to redeem this offer).

Peer to peer platforms have opened up great potential for meeting human needs in knowledge, science, culture and enterprise. Yet the last decade has seen much of the sharing economy co-opted by vested interests, businesses intent on extracting value from local communities by owning what we produce, or controlling the platforms that we increasingly rely on for work, food, transport and housing.

Communities are at a crossroads, the outcome of which depends on the choices each of us make as users, producers and consumers of platform services like Uber, Airbnb and Airtasker. We can continue down the road of business as usual, with a widening gap between haves and have nots, owners and producers, or we can begin to envision, design and develop community and worker-owned platform co-operatives and generative systems of value creation that serve the common good.

The latter we call the ‘Commons Economy’ and it is being built from the ground up by social entrepreneurs, advocates, scholars, innovators and activists from around the world. Creating this future is not a given, it is open ended and relies on each of us to play a part.

The Commons Transition Coalition invites you to this special event with international guest Nathan Schneider (US), co-convenor of the first ‘platform cooperativism’ conference (NYC), and a panel of local innovators to discover together how the commons economy is taking shape.

The second half of this event will be a Design Lab with AbilityMate to workshop ideas in development and seek feedback from fellow social enterprise practitioners.

International Speaker

Nathan Schneider is a scholar in residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and a journalist who writes about economy, technology, and religion. He is the author of two books, God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet and Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse. In 2015, he co-organized “Platform Cooperativism,” a pioneering conference on democratic online platforms at the New School. Follow his work on Twitter at @nathanairplane or on his website, TheRowBoat.com.

Panel Speakers

Serenity Hill is co-founder of the Open Food Network which provides online infrastructure for communities to co-create decentralised, transparent and sustainable food systems.

Eric Doriean is a co-founder and COO of AnyShare. AnyShare empowers sharing economy ventures and is the world’s first Internet based FairShares multi-stakeholder cooperative.

Antony McMullen works for Employee Ownership Australia and New Zealand, Catholic Social Services Victoria and Church of All Nations in member development, policy and communication areas.

Facilitators

Darren Sharp is the Director of Social Surplus, the Australian editor of Shareable and Melbourne Coordinator of the Sharing Cities Network.

José Ramos is the Director of Action Foresight, Research Fellow at Victoria University, and senior editor for the Journal of Futures Studies.

Design Lab

AbilityMate is a for-purpose movement co-founded by Melissa Fuller and Johan du Plessis who design and manufacture affordable Assistive Technology products with people who have disabilities. They create fully certified, high quality, open-source designs which are then 3D printed and assembled all around the world.

A limited number of bursary tickets are available. Please contact the organisers for more information.