Eva

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= aims "to create a 'Human Economy' tailored to the neighbourhood and its residents and employees".

URL:http://vzweva.be/

Description

"EVA aims to bring a different kind of economy into practice. It aims to develop an economy that contradicts economic trends of scale, profit maximization, relocation, and increasing pressure on workers and precarious working conditions. Instead they want to create a 'Human Economy' tailored to the neighbourhood and its residents and employees.

The projects that EVA develops aim to cater to local needs and provide accessible services for their users. EVA starts by listening to local residents to gain insight into the needs of those that live there. Even after this first consultation phase of a new service and once the development process is underway, EVA further tests their ideas with smaller groups. In addition, the initiatives developed EVA are created to involve the neighbourhood as to strengthen the community fabric. In this way, EVA works to really provide what people need."


Case Study

Morshed Mannan:

"Developing an alternative to Uber has been a recurrent theme in the discourse on platform cooperatives for some time (Scholz and Schneider, 2015). Indeed, some of the most prominent examples of platform cooperatives have been taxi cooperatives (Borowiak and Ji, 2019, p. 168) that have developed their own digital platforms (e.g. Cotabo in Bologna, Taxiapp in London, Alpha Taxi in Paris and Green Taxi Cooperative in Denver) and de novo ride-hailing cooperatives (e.g. the aforementioned Arcade City in Austin). The latter group face particularly stiff challenges, not only due to the existence of incumbents such as Uber and Lyft in major cities who can price them out of the market, but also due to the complexities of complying with multi-tiered, fast-evolving local regulation concerning ride-hailing, as well as driver skepticism about what alternatives have to offer.

During the year that the idea of Eva first emerged—in 2017—the province of Quebec was involved in a heated debate about how the ride-hailing sector should be regulated. Following a decision by the provincial government to toughen the rules for ride-hailing businesses (e.g., increasing the driver training requirement), Uber threatened to leave the province (Hawkins, 2017; Liptak, 2017). While Uber backtracked on those plans and continues to operate in Quebec at the time of writing, this prompted province-wide public discussions on the merits and drawbacks of ride-hailing as an industry. Among those were two students and friends at McGill University and Laval University, Dardan Isufi and Raphaël Gaudreault, who were of the view that while the organizational and management practices of capitalist ride-hailing companies like Uber were societally harmful, the technology they used—to show the arrival of a car, to keep track of invoices, to make online payments and so on—was not (Each For All, 2019). From the fall of 2017, they began brainstorming ideas about how to integrate this ride-hailing technology into an organizational structure that lowers the fees charged by ride-hailing intermediaries, maximizes the financial benefit of drivers and riders, gives drivers and riders a greater say in the operations of a ride-hailing business, protects their privacy and ensures that the business is rooted in the local community it serves, all the while allowing for the technology itself to be developed transnationally.

They settled on having a network of multi-stakeholder cooperatives, complemented by the use of the EOS protocol.38 In their 2018 White Paper, Eva laid out an ambitious use case for blockchain technology, which involved the issuance of ‘utility’ tokens for voting purposes, access to Eva’s services and as a long-term store of value (p. 8, 19); a stable, non-transferable ‘commodity’ token to exchange value between members within the platform (ibid, p. 19) and smart contracts for each step of the ride-hailing service, from drivers receiving a request from a potential rider to the driver’s payment and mutual rating (ibid, pp. 32-33). The technology and brand was to be developed by a non-profit foundation in Canada (ibid, p. 17) while the ride-hailing business was to be initiated, run and promoted by cooperatives formed in other cities of Canada and the world (ibid, pp. 14-15), including in Ontario, Algiers, Pristina, Mexico City and Houston (ibid, p. 37). However, a number of external factors compelled Eva to reconsider how they go about achieving their objectives. The crackdown by securities regulators, such as the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, on crypto-tokens—including purported utility tokens—by determining them to be unregistered securities (Debler, 2018), meant that the proposed token sale (Eva White Paper, pp. 21-22) might have had undesirable consequences for their operations. This, in turn, meant that the proposal that utility token holders would be able to vote on the work that the foundation does, the community’s direction and the foundation’s board, had to be recast (ibid, p. 27). More prosaically, the extensive work involved in building a successful ride-hailing business in the province of Quebec, coupled with the need to determine the precise terms of the continuing relationship between the global entity in charge of technology development and local cooperatives interested in offering a ride-hailing service, has meant that international expansion has temporarily stalled.

Yet, in spite of these teething problems, Eva has managed to make the transition from being a business plan to becoming Uber’s main rival in Quebec within the space of less than two years. After being granted permission to operate in Montreal, Quebec City and Gatineau in May 2019, Eva has gained over 20,000 passengers, 500 driver-user members (and a 1000 more in the authorization process) as well as some 50 supporter-members (Eva, 2019, p. 3; Jones, 2019). Eva’s current appeal has been attributed to its local provenance and the fact that the income and taxes generated by the business are circulated within the Quebec economy (Renauld Antoine [RA] Interview, 28.07.2020, at [49:00-49:15)]. Most importantly, there is a yawning gap between how Eva respects its driver-user members as individual humans compared to other ride-hailing companies.

In the words of one of Eva’s first driver-user members, Mike Calomiris, at “Eva, it’s

like, we are like family. With Uber, it’s just a phone number, you don’t know who you are talking to” (Mike Calomiris [MC] Interview, 11.07.2020, at [04:15-04:30]). Driver-user members feel they can speak to anyone in the cooperative very easily, from passengers interested in the cooperative model to other drivers to the management itself. In fact, one new driver-user member recalls that the first time they used the Eva app to hail a ride for themselves, they found that it was the COO himself (Dardan) driving the car, who spent the duration of the ride explaining how the Eva app works (RA Interview, 28.07.2020, at [03:00-03:15])!40 These discussions are not necessarily limited to the daily issues involved in driving but also extend to planning and strategizing, such as roadmapping the new features needed for driver-users (RA Interview, 28.07.2020, at [18:00- 18:30]). While the rollout of Eva in other cities has been slower than initially planned, cooperatives and local communities from Dhaka to Auckland to New York City have expressed an interest in becoming part of Eva’s fledgling ‘ecosystem’ over the years. However, this growth has required some concessions in how Eva is legally structured, as well as how blockchain technology is used.

While Eva did form a non-profit foundation to develop its ride-hailing technology, on 22 March 2019 it registered a corporation with limited liability under the Canada Business Corporations Act, 1985, ‘Eva Global Corp.’,41 to take over this responsibility. As Isufi explains, the early iterations of the backend software and application was built “with nothing…basically out of [their] hands and computers” (Dardan Isufi [DI] Interview, 12.08.2019, at [03:45-04:15]). Yet, the operational growth of the platform and Eva’s ability to hire crucial services—additional software developers, marketing experts and legal advisors—has been hampered by their chronic lack of financial resources. Till date, the major financial supporter of Eva has been the provincial government of Quebec and the Quebecois cooperatives, including the federation of credit unions, has provided some CAD$ 200,000 in funding. This sum helped Eva get on its feet but in the long-run is insufficient for growth to other cities and countries (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [09:00- 09:15]).

An issue that Isufi and his co-founder Raphaël Gaudreault encountered while meeting with financial cooperatives is the disconnect between the mindset of those managing ‘old world’ cooperatives, such as Desjardins, and those seeking to build platform cooperatives. As an anecdotal example, Isufi mentioned an early meeting with Desjardins in which they were asked how many members Eva had before its launch and when Desjardins learned that Eva only had two members, Isufi and Gaudreault, they said they typically finance cooperatives with at least 5000 members (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [09:29-09:45]). This indicates a lack of understanding of the two-sided platform business model, which requires ex ante investment to attract user-members on both sides of the market rather than just ex post investment once the platform already has a healthy user base. Choosing a corporate entity has thereby allowed them to both approach a wider range of investors and also offer their personnel stock options as part of their compensation package (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [05:15-05:30]). As of 10 July 2019, the Quebec business register shows that the board of Eva Global Corp. is composed of Dardan Isufi and Raphaël Gaudreault as Co-Presidents, Merouane Benthameur as Vice-President and Robert Gaudreault as Secretary. Raphaël Gaudreault, Isufi and Benthameur are also the three shareholders of the corporation.

One of the objectives of Eva is to charge a lower transaction fee than competitors so that riders have to pay lower fees and drivers retain a larger share of the fare. As such, the maximum transaction fee that can be charged is 15%. The Global Corp. receives 5% of this, primarily for server maintenance and licensing fees for third-party APIs such as Google Maps (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [11:45-12:15]), while the local multi-stakeholder cooperative operating the ride-hailing service can choose to charge between 0%- 10%. The first cooperative—a solidarity cooperative42—was founded in Montreal on 14 December 2017 and is a test case for how this business model can expand elsewhere. According to the bylaws (règlement de régie interne) of Coop de solidarité Eva, formed under Quebec’s Cooperatives Act, 1982 (C-67.2), the cooperative’s mission is to develop a new, sustainable model of mobility service that is based on the real (i.e. genuine) sharing economy (§1.2, Eva Bylaws). The by-laws also explain that the technology, trademarks and Eva brand are owned by Eva Global Corp. with the cooperative having the right to use the technology and brand name pursuant to the contractual terms agreed between the cooperative and the corporation (§1.3, Eva Bylaws).

As a multi-stakeholder cooperative, Eva has five categories of members: passengeruser members, driver-user members, worker members, individual supporter members and corporate supporter members (§1.4(h), Eva Bylaws). To become a member, it is necessary to acquire qualifying shares in the cooperative (§2.1, Eva Bylaws). While the supporter members buy-in to the cooperatives through monetary payments exclusively, the two categories of user-members are required to engage in a minimum number of transactions with the cooperative over the course of 12 months, with the buy-in amortized through their initial transactions with the cooperative (§§2.2(a)-(b), 3.3, Eva Bylaws). Prospective driver-user members are also required to be accredited by the cooperative, which includes passing a criminal background check, French language skills, having the appropriate drivers’ license, insurance, an appropriately new vehicle and completing an online training course (§3.7, Eva Bylaws) (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [07:30-08:30]; RA Interview, 28.07.2020, [07:00-08:15]). Worker members are obliged to additionally complete 480 hours of work for the cooperative as an ‘auxiliary’ (i.e. trial) worker-member before they can apply for admission to the cooperative(§§3.1, 3.6, Eva Bylaws). During this trial period, auxiliary workers are permitted to attend and speak at meetings of the cooperative but are not permitted to hold an official position within the cooperative or vote (§3.8, Eva Bylaws). While all five categories are required to pay CAD$ 10 to Eva for a single qualifying share in the cooperative (section 41, Cooperatives Act, 1982), the supporter members are obliged to additionally acquire 4 and 49 nonvoting, preferred shares in the cooperative respectively, also priced at CAD$ 10 per preferred share. The preferred shares are entitled to receive an interest payment, unlike common cooperative shareholders, and are obliged to hold the share for at least three years (sections 46, 48, 226.5 Cooperatives Act, 1982). Both the common and preferred cooperative shares are non-transferable and the non-qualifying shares can only be redeemed upon the death, resignation or exclusion of the members or when the member redeems their shares (§2.4, Eva Bylaws). If driver-user, passenger-user and worker members do not carry out transactions with the cooperative, their voting rights may be suspended by the board (§3.5, Eva Bylaws). Conversely, as is the general rule under Quebec’s cooperative law (section 226.8, Cooperatives Act, 1982), their patronage returns, if any, are determined by the proportion of the transactions with the cooperative (§7.2, Eva Bylaws) rather than the amount of cooperative shares held.

In terms of functionality, Eva aims to be unobtrusive in the transactions that take place between a driver and a rider. This explains their choice of using a permissioned ‘sister chain’ forked from the EOS protocol, as they wished to make use of a distributed protocol with very low latency so that the user experience is as seamless as possible. Eva’s protocol therefore uses the same open-source EOS software as the main EOS ledger but has their own internal token and allows for Eva to create their own features as needed.44 This means that Eva is, for the time being, operationally distinct from the main EOS ledger, although work is ongoing to enable ‘inter-blockchain-communication’ between the various chains of the EOS ecosystem (Aurora EOS, 2018). When Gaudreault and Isufi began working on Eva, EOS appeared to be the best compromise between the speed of a more centralized system and the privacy-preserving features of a blockchain.45 To make the use of a blockchain application less daunting for ordinary users, Eva also decided to make many of the common features of a decentralized application (‘DApp’) invisible, such as not requiring the user to have a crypto-currency wallet. For a person to use Eva’s platform, the user has to only provide their mobile phone number and create an Eva account, including bank account/credit card details, after which their private key is stored on their device which interacts with Eva’s protocol. The ride-hailing transaction is then more-or-less identical to other ride-hailing businesses. A passenger-member logs onto the application, sees available Eva vehicles on a map, specifies an address they wish to travel to and a ride dispatch algorithm informs a driver-user member about the request. The passenger is then informed in advance of their fare, prior to being picked up by the driver-user member (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [19:30-19:45]). The map—Google Maps or Waze—directsa driver-user member towards the passenger (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [10:00-10:45]), who is then dropped off at their destination and the driveruser member is paid. The driver-user member—who has a version of the application with additional driving privileges—can see where the passenger is on a map, can call the passenger, estimate the fare from the ride and decide to accept/reject the request. Significantly, there is no public rating of the driver-user members or the passenger-user member – a fact that relieves driver-user members of the mental burden and emotional labor involved in worrying about their rating (RA Interview, 28.07.2020, at [37:45-38:30]).

Behind the scenes, there are additional key differences between Eva and its competitors. In terms of data, the personal data of all of the users, their ongoing transactions and their historic use of the platform are all hashed47 and added to Eva’s protocol, so as to give them a degree of anonymity/pseudonymity. The idea behind this is to allow for as much personally identifiable information to remain on the device of the user as possible without infringing legal provisions that require disclosure of certain personally identifiable information to public authorities. This underscores how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies are ‘ambivalent’ on both privacy and transparency, with its impact depending on the choices of its developers (Dierksmeier and Seele, 2020, p. 355). Crucially, unlike Uber, this data is not used by the cooperative to prompt drivers to go to distinct parts of the city at distinct periods of time (Attoh et al., 2019, pp. 1012–1013). Instead, the application is supposed to allow drivers themselves privileged access to the key performance indicators collected by the local Eva cooperative, such as their cancellation rate and the difference between estimated travel time and actual travel time (Jones, 2019). To comply with local regulations and deal with accidents, the cooperative has internal management software to identify the name of a driver in any given ride, the driver’s account, the stage of their ride, historical rides, historical ride requests and whether they are online (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [31:15-31:45]).

Passenger names are hashed and only identifiable by their alphanumeric IDs on the protocol but their accounts can be removed from the distributed ledger (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [32:15-32:30]). This privileged insight not only allows the cooperative to notify law enforcement authorities about illegal acts committed by members but also remove the accounts of members from their protocol if needed. According to the driveruser members interviewed, the fact that the data of the drivers and the passenger-user members are ostensibly more secure, engenders greater trust in Eva than in competitors that centralize the collection, storage and processing of personal data (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [05:30-06:00]; RA Interview, 28.07.2020, at [20:00-21:00]). In certain circumstances, third parties (e.g., a municipality) may undertake their own analysis of, say, ride-hailing traffic patterns, based on only anonymized data using a block explorer. As member-owned organizations, it is anticipated that personal or collective data that may be valuable to third parties can in the future be licensed on the basis of personal or collective agreement (Isufi, 2018). Most notably, Eva Global Corp., as distinct from the local solidarity cooperative, does not have access to the personally identifiable information of any of the cooperative members, which again stands in marked contrast to businesses such as Uber. Thus, Eva dispels the notion that a ‘trade-off’ between privacy and access to labor markets (Jamil, 2020, p. 5) is an intrinsic feature of gig platforms.

While payments take place with ordinary credit cards in Canadian dollars, the platform internally uses a stable commodity token system as a means of accounting for the clearance of payments. As Gaudreault explains, when a driver is to be paid CAD$ 20, this amount is charged to the rider’s credit card, converted into commodity tokens of the same value (CAD$ 1 = 1 token) and effectively escrowed in a smart contract until the completion of the ride, when these tokens are automatically credited to the driver’s account, which she can then convert back into fiat currency (Jones, 2019). He estimates that in Quebec, drivers are earning 10-15% more than with their competitors and customers are paying roughly 5% less, given the lower transaction fee charged by Eva and the absence of surge pricing during hours of peak demand (ibid). This is echoed by Mike Calomiris, who estimates that he could earn a CAD$ 100 with Eva in 6 or 7 trips while it would take 12 trips to earn the same amount with Uber (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [24:15-25:15]). In addition, to encourage more drivers to switch to using Eva during peak hours such as the morning (0600-1000 hours) and afternoon rush (1500-1900 hours), Eva recently introduced a pilot program for their most committed, “proven” driver-user members. During these four-hour periods driver-user members are guaranteed a minimum income of CAD$ 15 per hour if they keep their Eva app on, which is only paid if the driver-user members themselves do not earn CAD$15 or more per hour during this period (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [29:30-30:30]). These material advantages are complemented by the involvement of these stakeholders in the governance of the Eva cooperatives. Section 80 of Quebec’s Cooperatives Act, 1982, permits a cooperative board to have between 3 and 15 directors, with Eva presently having five directors.48 To be eligible for directorship, a member must have fully paid-up their cooperative share, and each class of member is entitled to appoint a certain number of positions on the board. Passengeruser members, driver-user members and supporter-members are entitled to appoint 1 director each, while worker-members are entitled to appoint 2 directors (§5.3 Eva Bylaws, section 226.6, Cooperatives Act, 1982). Two of the directors share the duty of being copresidents (i.e. chairpersons), one director is vice-president, one director is secretary and one director is the treasurer. The co-presidents are responsible for defining the overall strategy of cooperative over the short-, mid- and long-term (§6.1(d), Eva Bylaws). The tenure of these directors is for 3 years and the (re)appointment of directors is staggered after three years have elapsed from the founding of the cooperatives (§5.4.1, Eva Bylaws; section 84, Cooperatives Act, 1982). Elections of nominee directors only take place if there are a greater number of nominees for a position than there are vacancies (§5.5(b)(5), Eva Bylaws). The board meets as many times as required by the interests of the cooperative— physically or virtually—and quorum is met if the majority of the board (i.e. three of the five directors) are present (§5.6, Eva Bylaws; section 93, Cooperative Act, 1982).

The annual General Assembly of the cooperative (and any extraordinary general assemblies) brings together all the classes of members of the cooperative to decide upon, among other things, the appointment of auditors, the (re)appointment of directors and the distribution of the cooperative’s surplus.49 Notice for these assemblies are given through an in-app notification and through messages on social media (§4.1.1., Eva Bylaws). Given the potentially large number of user-members, it is possible for passenger-user and driver-user members to appoint delegates and alternate members to act as proxies for these assemblies. Pursuant to section 73 of the Cooperatives Act, 1982 and §4.4 of Eva’s Bylaws, if the cooperative has a 100 or more user-members in multiple judicial districts, driver-user members and passenger-user members must each appoint a representative delegate at a specially convened meeting to appear on their behalf in these assemblies. These delegates—or their duly-appointed substitutes—will only have one vote. Supporter-members can appoint delegates in a similar manner (§4.5 of Eva’s Bylaws). Should the cooperative decide, any and all of these meetings and assemblies can take place electronically (§4.6, Eva Bylaws), including the casting of votes. There is no requirement for a minimum number or percentage of registered members to be present for a meeting to have quorum at the General Assembly (section 64, Cooperatives Act, 1982; §4.7, Eva Bylaws).

Aside from these legally required meetings, the board of the cooperative regularly meet with the drivers in person—at pizza nights hosted at their office or over coffee at cafés— as well as through their social media channels (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [18:00-18:15], MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [28:45-29:15]). These informal meetings are an occasion for the developers to receive feedback and for those present to collectively plan marketing strategies, such as offering 5-dollar coupons for rides and advertising to universities (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [21:45-22:00]). This driver-user member feedback is critical as it helps the management and 10-person software development team identify bugs in the application, ranging from fraudulent passengers who used fake/stolen credit cards to make payments to the map not accurately displaying the location and distance of the car to a passenger. Such bugs can have significant consequences for the cooperative as well as the drivers and passengers. For instance, incorrectly displaying the location of a car on a map can prolong the waiting/driving time. However, to its credit, Eva ironed out several of these bugs in subsequent software updates (Hudzilin, 2020) and when drivers picked up fraudulent passengers and had to cancel a trip, the business paid for the journey that was undertaken (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [16:15-16:45]). At the same time, some driver-user members feel valued when there is a transparent discussion about resolving a bug. In Renauld Antonine’s words, at Eva “it is easy to send screenshots and there are like different [Telegram] channels where we can participate. The discussion is always open, which is cool! In the past, when I used to work for Uber, many times I wanted to give feedback about the app. They don’t care! They say, thank you, but I don’t know what happens next” (RA Interview, 28.07.2020, at [15:00-15:30], insertion mine). While not being a technical issue, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has also required Eva to act in the interests of its members who have been quarantined and unable to make trips. Instead of asking drivers to pay to buy a plastic protector, Eva has been offering its driver-user members these protectors, masks and sanitizers for free (MC Interview, 11.07.2020, at [45:30-46:15]).

Another significant difference between the earlier White Paper and the 2019 Business Plan of Eva is the prominent role that is now given to social franchising (Alon, 2014, p. 3) for the purposes of national and international expansion (see Figure 3). As with commercial franchises, a social franchisor permits franchisees50 to use their trademark and operations processes (including software) for monetary consideration (Giudici et al., 2018, pp. 2, 12), but this is coupled with the requirement that the franchisee seek to solve a social problem. Asemota and Chahine define social franchising as a “process through which a social venture can scale up the coverage of its successfully proven social concept to its target population while maintaining the quality of its service delivery” (2017, p. 2737). The most prominent social franchises are in the healthcare sector (Alur and Schoormans, 2011; Bishai et al., 2015; Naatu and Alon, 2019, p. 758), but are also present in other industries such as ICT reuse (Zajko and Bradač Hojnik, 2018). It may be argued that consumer cooperative franchises can also be considered a form of social franchising as they require retail outlet franchisees to ascribe to cooperatives values and principles and provide their consumers access to cooperative membership (Co-operative Group Limited, 2019).

While Eva is still preparing its social franchise template and franchise operations manual with the support of a Canadian cooperative-oriented law firm, Isufi and Gaudreault both mention that an important term of the agreement will be the setting up of nodes by the franchisee, including acting as a block producer and as an API node, running a web server and using a ‘demultiplexer’ that provides business intelligence to the node operator based on live transactions on the protocol (e.g. failed rides) and an interface for managing the ride-hailing service within a certain territory (e.g. promotions, discounts). In addition, the social franchisee will also share the corporate email address of Eva and have their website developed by Eva (DI Interview, 12.08.2019, at [35:15-35:30]). Given that Eva Global Corp., is a for-profit franchisor and the potential franchisees could be both for-profit and not-for-profit entities dedicated to multi-stakeholder interests, it fits the social franchise investment model of social franchising (Crawford-Spencer and Cantatore, 2016, pp. 52–53). This reflects the fact that in contrast to other models of social franchising in which the franchisor is a not-for-profit entity, Eva Global Corp. is for-profit corporation but franchisees invest in the franchise system for not-for-profit purposes, including improving the working conditions of its driver-user members. At present, the cooperative in Montreal is the first ‘social franchisee’ in the network, with there being plans for social franchisees in Alberta, Quebec City, Saguenay and New York City in the near future (Duchaine, 2020; Hudzilin, 2020).

A franchise system has often been studied as a form of network organization (Tuunanen et al., 2011) and arguably, it can also be considered a federated structure when control over key decisions is bi-directional. Typically, control in franchising agreements is topdown, rather than bottom-up. After all, it is the franchisor that gets to decide whether to allow another business to be a franchisee and often retains strategic decision-making rights regarding the franchise (Mumdžiev and Windsperger, 2011, p. 451). However, as Mumdžiev and Windsperger show in the context of German and Austrian commercial franchises, franchise agreements allocate residual decision-making rights (i.e., the authority to make decisions that are not mentioned in a contract or cannot be specified in a contract) to franchisees depending on the importance of intangible, difficult-totransfer local-market knowledge, relative to the importance of the intangible assets of the franchisor. In other words, assets that are viewed as being amenable to contracting remain within the decision-making purview of the franchisor, while other decisions such as the introduction of a new service for a local market or recruitment, are left to the franchisee (Mumdžiev and Windsperger, 2011, pp. 456, 458–459; Rajan and Zingales, 1998, p. 387). Given the extent to which the ride-hailing business relies on local market knowledge, the particularities of urban mobility in different countries (e.g., the use of cash, different modes of transport) and the importance of onboarding new users, it would be unsurprising if Eva’s ‘model’ social franchise agreement delegates extensive operational and strategic decision-making rights to local cooperatives. In doing so, Eva Global Corp. is gradually taking on the functions of a shared-services platform cooperative, serving the technological needs of its franchisees. Existing examples of social franchises indicate that such arrangements foster horizontal learning, as the franchisor coordinates knowledge sharing among franchisees, particularly concerning innovative practices (Giudici et al., 2018, p. 11). Eventually, it may be the case that Eva Global Corp. itself becomes owned by its franchisees and their members, as originally envisioned in the Eva White Paper. The foregrounding of the ‘nodes’ in the social franchise network, the building of relations between them and the gradual selfeffacement of the franchisor could thereby enable a shift towards a distributed (rather than simply a decentralized) network; as an organization and as a protocol."

(https://ia801707.us.archive.org/9/items/morshed-mannan-single-web/Morshed%20Mannan_single_web.pdf)