Internet of Ownership
Since reporting on an emerging interest in ownership among tech entrepreneurs in 2014 and co-organizing the first “platform cooperativism” conference with Trebor Scholz at the New School in 2015, MEDLab director Nathan Schneider has been active in organizing and documenting this growing movement aiming to build an ecosystem for cooperative business in the online economy.
MEDLab has focused on developing the concept of “exit to community” (E2C), a set of narratives and strategies to re-orient the startup economy toward community ownership and accountability.
Supported by fellowships from the Open Society Foundations and Rutgers University’s Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing.
Publications
- The Internet of Ownership, a resource-sharing network that includes a directory of the platform co-op ecosystem
- Morshed Mannan and Nathan Schneider, “Conversion to Accountability: Strategies for Multi-Stakeholder Ownership in the Platform Economy”
- Nathan Schneider and Jason Wiener, “Exit to Co-op,” concept slide deck (2017)
- Nathan Schneider, “VirtualCoop,” concept whitepaper (2018)
- Nathan Schneider, “An Internet of Ownership: Democratic Design for the Online Economy,” The Sociological Review 66, no. 2 (March 2018)
- Nathan Schneider, “Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community
- Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider (eds.), Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet (OR Books, 2016)
Collaborators
Posts
- Exit to Community: Community Culture / - Learn about community culture from two specialists in digital organizing
- Exit to Community: Legal Options / - Expect to come away with actionable tools for engineering your own E2C
- Exit to Community: A New Option for Startups? / - What if startups could transition to ownership by the people who rely on them most?
- If I Only Had a Heart: Accounting for Care Work in Organizations / - Activist Stacco Troncoso introduces the Decentralized Cooperative Organization
- The Future of Startups, from Unicorns to Zebras / - A conversation with Mara Zepeda of Zebras Unite
- Startups Need a New Option: Exit to Community / - Why are we building disposable companies?
- The Curafied Co-op Story: A Prequel / - "That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you disrupt an industry"
- The New Trusts: Democratic Ownership Beyond the ESOP / - A webinar on emerging explorations on trust structures—their promise and their problems
- Meet KOSAKTI, a Creative New Cooperative in Indonesia / - How one organization is enabling many more to get started
- Co-ops Need Leaders, Too / - The co-op tradition is full of leaders, but we pretend they don't exist
- Organizations as Abstractions Over the Law / - How democratic innovators are hacking incorporation statutes
- Hypothesis: ESOPs for the Online Economy / - Introducing a research project on user-owned trusts