Problem:
How to think through collaborative digital platforms when thinking about the new forms of capitalism and technology that these platforms enable?
Activity:
The goal of the overarching exercise is for groups to develop a "start up" enterprise (any form of organization) + product (collaborative platform loosely defined) that would facilitate some form of collaborative economy. It will integrate and/or leverage lessons learned throughout the week. The product could range from earnest acquisitiveness to outright agonistic opposition, but it should resemble a contemporary enterprise (for-profit, non-profit, union, terror cell) and produce a possible product.
Each group will craft the product, entity, and eventually business model and sustainability plan over the course of the week using a specific contemporary business model / canvas approach (I'll introduce a few in my talk). They will use git & Github (a collaborative Version Control System and cloud host) to maintain a blog and document their activity.
At the end of the week each team will deliver a "pitch" evaluated by capitalist fat cats Jemielniak, Murgia, Teli, and Csikszentmihalyi directly after Jemielniak's talk.
F.A.Q.
1. What is the point?
The point of this project is to have fun and to try to think through the collaborative economy through digital platforms, the form of digital mediation that allows our acivities to be turned into valuable data.
2. Remind me, what is a platform?
According to Nick Srnicek's Platform Capitalism, "Platforms, in sum, are a new type of firm; they are characterised by:
- providing the infrastructure to intermediate between different user groups,
- displaying monopoly tendencies driven by network effects,
- employing cross-subsidisation to draw in different user groups, and by
- having a designed core architecture that governs the interaction possibilities."
Or, in the simpler Jim Clark formulation, it's where you put some software in the middle of a bunch of activity in order to capture data being generated by that activity, thus extracting value.
3. How do we work?
We are suggesting you use Github Pages, what is behind this page, to document your process or make an organizational web site. Github is an example of an important part of collaborative software production, version control systems, that help manage complex projects. Wikipedia uses principles of version control, as does Google Docs. Some companies use Github as a technical equivalent of a CV. Github Pages uses the same backend as what coders use in Github, but serves simple web pages. To edit the pages you use "markdown," similar to how Wikipedia pages are edited.
Obviously, if you have another platform that you prefer, feel free to use it.
4. How seriously should we take this?
This is an opportunity, have fun and don't worry. We would like you to learn something out of it, but if you have already launched several startups, we'll understand if you are blasé.
Sources
For looking at how to structure your business, take a look at sites like Canvasizer or Strategyzer and of course there's lots of information about how these models came about.
For getting the sense of the "pitch" take a listen to this podcast or more hilariously this one.