S2 Ep. 19 Nathan Schneider – From Platform Coops to Exit to Community

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

We explore how entrepreneurship within cooperative movements help to drive community ownership in the online economy. We’re excited to be joined by Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who we know from the early days of the platform coop movement, when he participated in the first ever Ouishare Fest in 2013.

The very fact that Ouishare Fest brought Nathan together with Trebor Schultz for the first time is telling of what a powerful space that Ouishare Fest provides. And this year, Ouishare Fest is back, organised next week right at the outskirts of Paris - from 23 to 25 June. Check it out at http://ouisharefest2021.com/.

Currently, Nathan Schnieder directs the Media Enterprise Design Lab, and he has written books on cooperative enterprise, the Occupy movement, God, and the Internet. He is truly fascinated by the chronicling of ideas, of perfect worlds, of ordinary imaginations in practice. With his experimental attitude, Nathan believes that every word is a hypothesis and a test.

Tune in to this episode as we explore the cooperative movement and the different forms of community opportunities it provides. We also discuss ‘benevolent dictatorship’, levels of community participation, multi-stakeholder structures, and what we mean by community.

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our Medium publication: https://platformdesigntoolkit.com/Podcast-S2E19-Nathan-Schneider

To find out more about Nathan’s work:

> Website: https://nathanschneider.info/

> MEDLab: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/

Other references and mentions:

> Ouishare Fest: https://www.ouishare.net/fest

> Start.coop: https://start.coop/

> Stocksy United: https://www.stocksy.com/

> Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy, 2018: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Everyone-Radical-Tradition-Shaping-ebook/dp/B078W6L1V7

> Loco: https://loco.coop/

> Morshed Mannan and Nathan Schneider, Exit To Community: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy, 2021: https://georgetownlawtechreview.org/exit-to-community-strategies-for-multi-stakeholder-ownership-in-the-platform-economy/GLTR-05-2021/

> Nathan Schneider, Mediated ownership: capital as media, 2020: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0163443719899035

> S2 EP. 18: Software and Protocols for a new way of Organizing — with Bryan Peters, Rob Solomon & Sascha Kellert: https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/software-and-protocols-for-a-new-way-of-organizing-with-bryan-peters-rob-solomon-sascha-710b858dd77b

> The Metagovernance Project: https://metagov.org/

> Nathan Schneider, Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Joshua Z. Tan, Amy X. Zhang, Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities, 2021: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3449090

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on 1 June 2021.