Bauwens Chicago Notes

draft transcript of low quality audio from a participation of Michel Bauwens in a Chicago event

notes from Sally Duros

Michel

Opening

Michel: This is my current enthusiasm. It's about [inaudible 00:00:05] economic networks. There is actually one being built very close to here in Madison Wisconsin. It's called the Mutual Aid Network. Stephanie Reary can first [inaudible 00:00:17] amongst the meeting people in that project, and of course you can correct me because I'm probably giving you a very basic understanding of what it is. But it's basically mapping together what people in Madison are already doing and then creating complementary so that the value can start flowing amongst these networks. So putting the Time Bank in connection with the Food Co-op, in connection with the Savings Pool, in connection with the Social Justice Center in connection with et cetera, the co-working space, and trying to find ways in which this ethical economy can start supporting each other, so that bit by bit you create a full alternative economic system.

There's a couple of older people that I met there. They are also doing something very exciting. It's called, "open value accounting," because this is something that often goes wrong in commons projects.

[REVISED] An Example might be a blogging platform where people worked for free writing for that platform. The writers create value for that platform, because the writing is what brings value to an empty journalism platform. Then the owner sells the platform for several million dollars and the owner keeps the money. Many people had worked for free, and one person captures the value of the common work, and this is not fair..

So open value accounting is a way that people who don't work for money, they are still writing because they want to write and contribute, can log in their efforts. It can be peer reviewed, because people can say a lot of things on their own, then you get a karma score. The social contract is, if somehow we make money with this, it will be distributed backwards in a funnel back to all the people who have contributed to this project. This allows you to, at the same time, still work not work for money, for all kinds of motivations including altruism. But if somehow value is created, it will be fairly distributed. So it's called open value accounting. It's a very interesting thing.

Two more examples and I'll shut up. This is a French project called encommun.org- "In the common.org," if you like. And they're mapping in Lille, in the North of France ... Okay, what does the project do? What is it doing in terms of physical commons, like a mutualized space, like a coworking space, or a fablab, or a hacker space, or intentional community �

Page 3 of 17 from the seventh floor. What is sharing virtually? Is it sharing it's knowledge and how? Right, because it's unethical to make an invention and then privatize it, in my view. If you have a solution for the world, and you patent it and then you shelve it, that's not a good thing, in my view. We can discuss this later.

Then they're looking at value streams- like, what is this entity doing for the common good for the commons? They're not mapping it yet, but they're doing the first step, which is actually showing what is happening that region. This is amazing because you always think, "Nothing is happening. I'm alone."

Let me give you a little anecdote. I was in Amsterdam and there were two people. There were three, I forgot to tell you one. But one was from the transition town movement and one was from this sharing economy called "We Share." I don't know if you know it, but if you open a map in Google Earth and you have these arrows coming out, right? Twice the map was black. In other words, we couldn't see the city because so many initiatives were already taking place. So it's very important to map things to show people that they're not alone and that things are happening.

I wanted to mention a third one. Okay, this is one I'm working more closely together, so I'm not just observing but I'm a participant. This is called "Fair Coop," and the idea is to create a global coalition of open cooperatives. What is the difference between a classic coop and an open coop? A classic coop only works for it's members. That's good. One worker, one good is certainly better than one million shares for one club, right? But still, very often coops tend to eventually hold to the same kind of practices than firms. They have the same hierarchy, they have- they're kind of adapting themselves to the main-stream and then they end up being very similar.

An open coop is a coop that is structurally engaged to create in commons. Now, I'll just give one example. This is in South Quito, where I stayed for six months last year. This is a housing coop for the poorest of the poor in South Quito. You need a little money and then they have an interest free mortgage that is very low plan so many many people can afford it. In order to become a member, that is the first condition. The second condition is you need to learn about the cooperative spirit. So there's like acting coops, you cooperate, as it were. But the third one is very important. They need to work one hundred hours a year for the coop. Here's what they do with it- this is what's interesting. They don't work for themselves. They are cleaning up the ravines- because in Quito you have these really deep ravines that you can't see if you look but � they're very deep- and poor people basically throw their trash in there. So they are horrible. They clean them out, and they give that as a public park. This is a coop that actively creates a commons. Mondragon, which I really like, but they don't create a commons. Everything they do is private. It's good for them, it's good for their community, but it's not necessarily good for the people outside the community. So by actively creating a commons, structurally in your statutes, in your social charters, whatever you do, you are doing something for the common good. And I think this is the kind of way we should be thinking. So this is what I'm excited about. It's about these projects that bring things together. It's already happening but you need to go the extra step to make it strong and to scale it, which is putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Speaker 2: Michele could remind us what the commons is?

Michel: Okay. In one phrase, yeah? It's very simple. The common is a shared resources that is co-governed by it's users. So it's wrong to say nature is a commons. It could be, but it's not. It really needs a governance side. Do the people who live there actually have a say in co-managing that resource? So you have physical commons- can be forest, can be fisheries, can be farms- but now what you have is also immaterial commons. And they're very important because knowledge is very important. So you have open knowledge, open software, and open design, which allows you to create global open communities where all the knowledge converges. Then because we are also distributing machinery and capital now- 3D printing, laser cutters, all these things- allow you to think differently about production. Everything that's light is global, everything that's heaving is local. So you're actually making it locally, but you're sharing it with everyone who can benefit from it in the whole world. Farmers in Peru can work with farmers in Bhutan, they have the same biotope, they can share seeds, they can share research, they can learn from each other. That makes them scale in a way that wasn't really possible before.

Speaker: Yay.

Speaker 2: So, I really like this question, because it's an easy one for you: What are you excited about that you're working on right now because usually because that's an easy question to answer, because I'm often working on something that excites me. I'm going to start with something that might sound boring, but I think it is very exciting, is governance. I work with a food coop and a movie theater coop downstate in Urbana, and one of the things we found is that capital is very easy to raise, actually getting the money to do an interesting project. The scarce resource is leadership, and people who govern some common resource that the community

� wants but people that both have the time, the intention and the skills to step up and take responsibility for it. I think that is something that is a scarce resource that we need to develop. So governance is something that excites me, which may surprise some people. The other thing is I'm-

Speaker: So you're saying leadership is a scarce resource, money-capital- is not scarce?

Speaker 2: Much, much less scarce. Speaker: That's exciting.

Speaker 2: There are a lot of innovative ways to raise capital. It's much more difficult to raise a group of leaders and people who will say, "This is a great idea."

It often happens that I get excited about ideas, talk to people, and then you can feel that it just falls flat in terms of, "I can never make it happen." And it's like, "No that's not true! You can make it happen." And money is really the lowest stumbling block to a lot of projects, I find. So that's kind of the mundane.

On the other side, I came here because I met Steve through the Open Government Hack Night, which is a group of do-gooders that meets once a week in the merchandise mart. They call it the "intersection of civics and technology" and so I work in technology. I'm a software consultant, and a project that I'm in the middle of working on right now involves big data. I'm not sure if that's a buzzword that's reached the consciousness of everyone right now. But Google, for example, harvests all this data that comes out of our lives and they've developed these technologies that will go through and sift through it, mostly to market things to you. But we can use this technology. Part of what it's about is identifying communities that don't know that they're communities yet. So you can look across all this data and you find this common pattern that exists between people and they may not even know that they're fit into these common patterns and I think that that's the raw material for cooperation. That cooperatives are often about something that is a group of people that have something in common. So if we can use big data as a way to help people find each other, then that's a way of taking this technology that's been developed for very selfish, commercial uses, and use it for our own good.

This example of what we're working on is- I think business that are prime candidates for coops are things that are rich in social returns, maybe not � so powerful in terms of financial returns. The example of something that I worked on is an Arthouse movie theater in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois where ... people loved it. It created a community. It brought people together. We had discussions about ideas, but it barely broke even. It broke even, but not in a grand way. Two years ago, the industry moved from film to digital, which required an eighty-thousand dollar investment and so the one person who owned and operated the movie theater, it was unfair to ask him to raise eighty-thousand dollars of his own capital to put into a business that would never make financial returns. What we did is we got two hundred people in the community to raise money individually, in small pieces. We bought it, we now own it, and so no one person is taking all the risk on.

So this project I'm working on right is we're looking at the city of Chicago's business license database to find commercial deserts in the city. As they've organized, they've got grocery stores- which is the classic tobacco shops, childcare, hospitals, all these different businesses, mapped down to individual streets. What we've done is pulled this into a big data analysis and found, first of all, where the deserts are and where there's a glut and where's a limitation of things. But what we've also done is found within a desert, there might be a grocery store that three hundred thousand people depend on. If it goes, they won't have anything within a mile of their home, and it seems like it's much easier to keep something that's there alive, than trying to create something new. We're looking at how we can start using this data to find, basically, cooperative investments. Go in and say, "Mom and Pop shop, before Mom and Pop sell out and close, see if you can sell it to the community." That's my current, what I'm interested in.

John Steven: Hi, I'm John Steven Bianucci and what I'm really excited about is that I'm here extending my self, my head is opened up and I'm with all these new ideas and with all you people with common values that I'm really excited about. So that's, right now, the most excited where I am right on top. I work for a company called Iroquois Valley Farms, and it is a for-profit company. It is a certified D corporation. We were certified in 2012. We're a farmland access company. We connect socially responsible investors with local and organic farmland, and all the farmers have to agree to convert the land to organic.

Two things, on the landscape of agriculture in the United States, when the company started and then when I got in to it is: one thing is whenever you picture a farmer on the land, working the land, fifty percent chance that he doesn't own that land. He's leasing it, and he's leasing it year to year from a landlord who in most cases- as you've seen � what's happened in agriculture- we've got four hundred million acres of farmland, less than 0.7 percent of it is organic today. Most of it- ecocide is being committed every year on the American agricultural system. It's ecocide. We're poisoning ourselves and the whole planet extremely badly.

So Iroquois Valley Farms was to keep the farmer on the land, so that was the main thing. It was to build a company that was committed to keeping the farmer on the land, which means that it had to have safe and patient capital. Converting the land is one thing, it's a process of converting it to organic. It's harder to convert capital. The company started in 2007, with one farm, now it's twenty-one farms in seven states, almost three thousand acres of farmland that is either organic or transitioning to organic.

One of the things that I'm searching for is ways to make this scale massively. Our plan is this year we'll raise another twenty million, that's our CEO and co-founder's plan. That'll double us, there'll be six thousand acres that's organic. There's still almost four hundred million that's carpet bombed. I'm thinking there's solutions here and connections. I'm very excited about that. I'm excited about local and regional food systems. I'm excited that food is a medium- we can all agree on good food, what good food is. If we're all sitting down at the table, we all agree: this is good food or this is not good food. We don't want to eat it, or we're loving it together. It's a way to catalyze a movement and I've felt this at the slow money conferences I've been to, that the kind of camaraderie and real closeness, this is the kind of thing that a movement needs to really happen worldwide. So being around food and dealing with all these issues is something that I'm excited about. There's potential here.

You know, in the United States it was agrarian and farmer-lead movements that were the strongest social movements in this country that have been crushed. They were crushed as a result of what happened with World War I. Coming back to the food, we're in the right place to being able to make something happen, really. This is something where farmers around the world are being oppressed, and so we're all being oppressed. We can all gather around food. I've been organic since I was thirteen years old, and I was like, "Can I have this part of the food budget, because I'm going to eat organically." So that was where the line was drawn with me, and it really catalyzes me. I've been fortunate enough to eat well all my life, whenever I chose to, and many people can't. They live in food deserts. So there's a lot of things we can do here. That's great connection. So everybody should be able to eat well.

I go back to, why is this important? Well, Rudolph Steiner was- in the 1920s, in 1924 a few months before his death, some farmers who were having trouble with their crops, they were already noticing that the life force in the food, because of what was in modern agriculture, wasn't what they had lived with before. We've never even experienced that kind- well, maybe we do. If we're on organic, bio-dynamic farms. But that was a big concern of is there life force in the food systems and in the food that we eat so that humans can even make decisions that are human. There's one piece- I haven't been able to go back and find it- something that Steiner wrote and I thought about it. Once I thought about it and thought about it and then I went back and said, "Oh, what he's saying is really that we can become more human or we can become less human as a species, as a race. We can either become more human or less human. And a linchpin of being able to make decisions and have the energy and the life force to become more human- food is a very important component of that." So I'm excited to be part of that, but I'm really excited to be here with all of you and to listen and share.

Sally: Wow. I don't know what to even say. I'm like you. I'm sitting here going, "I can't believe I'm hearing this," because I have been a long observer of this stuff through hanging around with networks that Jean's a part of, and other networks. I'm part of the OpenGov world. I don't go the Hacknights that much. The local food thing. I have a friend that is deeply involved in that. And what you were saying about accounting, was just making me feel so happy.

Sally: What you were saying about looking for resources inside the city, it's just the way I've been thinking for a long, long time. So it's so exciting we have all these people in this room who are thinking the same way, because it's such a rare thing, and I want to just go, "Yay! Good work!" It's kind of everywhere, but we're not usually in a space together.

I've been following this virtually for a long time, and what am I most excited about right now? One of the things that's been grounding me in all the things that I follow and watch and share on the internet nowadays, one of the things that has always grounded me is kind of a spiritual orientation around compassion.

In the networks that I'm involved in, and those spiritual networks I'm involved in, I've seen several organizations that I'm involved with kind of struggling to find a business model in this world, you know? I've been playing around with certain ideas, and I've been helping my friends who are running Buddhist centers or running yoga studios, and then helping them over the years try to figure out how can we continue to do the work that we want to do in the neighborhood in a place, and sustain ourselves and a lot of stuff like this. Buddhist tradition is like pay what you can ... So I'm very excited that there are ideas here that we can use in those communities,

But compassion itself, when I think about it and I've been seeing the web evolve, I think compassion is fuel, it's gasoline, it's something and that's something that I've really, really thinking about a lot. Because what I write about now- I'm a journalist now, I used to work in government a long time ago and I got to experience that wonderful hierarchical command and control kind of system that just kind of squeezes the life out of people- I have some bias. But anyway, I've been looking for a way that all the love and the compassion and the beauty in the world could really continue to drive us, to continue to nurture us. I've been looking for that solution in the journalism world, because I do think that there is value in reporting and amplifying good things or events that are occurring, so that they could be replicated.

But the whole idea of compassion driving or fueling change, I think could have some utility in the world of information delivery. I've been writing about that.

You were talking about how capital- I'm fascinated by this- capital is easier to get than leadership? I just wrote a column the other day for Knight Digital Media Center about adaptive skills and how a foundation is using adaptive skills in Wisconsin, with it's community, in order to kind of enable them to then do human centered information delivery.

Speaker 2: What does adaptive skills mean?

Sally: Adaptive skills means a certain way of being able to listen. It's almost a spiritual transformation, in a way. It's like understanding that the person next to you has something to say. Like Jean said, when she started off. It's in a community that's a deep desert in terms of many things. I could just go on and on.

John Steven: What's the foundation?

Sally: It's called Incourage Foundation. There's a place where I finally found compassion being stimulated at the community level and it's now starting to percolate out into information that the community needs in order to thrive, one would hope.

John Steven: I think it's so cool that you say compassion is fuel. We can think that our whole system is run on how much fossil fuels do we have that we can burn, or we can do things based on compassion and increasing compassion and that's the horsepower to do it.

Speaker 5: It's self- amplifying.

John Steven: We don't have to think in terms of, "Well, if I've got enough physical power through gasoline to do it, then I can do it." Well, no, compassion can do it because compassion can have it happen in a cooperative way because we're passing the compassion forward to someone else, so we're giving someone else more life, and a better life experience, and more living and more spirituality in their life.

Sally: Well, I see it happening in places.

Speaker 2: I was curious at the time, what both of you were saying. Do you think compassion is heavy or light?

Michel: I was just going to say something about it. The point to go back to the etymology of the word, because for too often compassion is thought of as, "Poor you. I'm actually superior to you, I have compassion with your suffering and your problems." Well, actually the word means "to feel with." It doesn't mean looking down, it actually means feeling with. So there is a connection with the commons there because it's quite important. This is something I read a long time ago in Orion magazine. They compared to professors in New York, way back. One was a critical leftist professor in ecology, as explaining all the facts about how bad things were. Another one was a biologist, and went for the students to look for mushrooms in the forest. Ten years later, none of the students of the leftists professor were active because they had all been- because they lost their energy. They thought, "Things are so bad. There's nothing we can do about it." So they became cynical. But the people who had learned to love the mushrooms in the forest, almost all became ecologists, right. So what the commons does, if you are co-constructing a shared resource that you love together, it actually creates this compassion. You have a shared object of love that is beyond you. We're all making this free software. We're all making this open design. We are creating this intentional community, this mutualized workplace. So these commons actually do create this co-feeling between people.

Speaker 2: I was thinking about what you said about how light things are global and heavy things are global, and I just thought I'd ask: is compassion a light thing, is it global, or is it something that's local, that's unique locally? Michel: Yeah, it's a good point. We were discussing this with Todd and Anthea last night, about the difference between the left and the right.

Speaker 2: Here it is!

Michel: Here it is. People on the right love their own and they're very nice with their own. If you're an evangelical and somebody gets sick, you visit the sick in the hospital, which people on the left rarely do. But what the left has is the capacity to extend the care to people who are not our own. This is the polarity, and I read once that the hormone of love is also the hormone of hate. So if a mother has a baby, she loves the baby but she wants to protect it at the same time. It's the same hormone that makes us love, that also makes us mean. Isn't that interesting?

The work we have to do with ourselves, this is true compassion and awareness, is to extend that compassion. But you have to start from where you are, yourself, your family, your community. But hopefully, yes, globally, because, the planet needs that kind of global care, which is more difficult. It requires more work to be able to extend your care. And this is the danger of the left- not becoming too abstract about it. I love humanity, but the guy next door ... I don't really like him and I won't do anything for him. This is typical danger for people on the left where they care for humanity but not for the real humans who are next door.

Sally: I was going to say, I think what you were saying about not really loving the people next door- in some of my journalism I write about neighborhoods. And that's one of the things I love about neighborhoods is the love in the neighborhoods. I mean, there's a lot of [inaudible 00:32:12] too, over the fence, but ultimately, people in Chicago- I don't know about other places- but people in Chicago really identify with their neighborhoods and love their neighbors. They do stuff together, and I think that's really cool.

John Steven: You know, those-

Speaker 2: If I can just interrupt super briefly. You guys did a fabulous job of just seguewaying into your conversation. That was beautiful. I want to spend the next ten minutes pop in. I'm looking at the time and going, "Oh, we are quite a ways behind schedule." You can go ahead and start and then if there's anybody in the outer circle, we're going to spend another few minutes ... "

Michel: Should we sit differently, maybe, or ... ?

Speaker 2: No, this chair is for somebody from the outer circle to step in and you guys will all make eye contact and negotiate who is going to take that position and we'll have another ten minutes of conversation.

John Steven: Okay. I wanted to say- your idea about compassion as fuel makes me think of a frustration I felt when I got into the impact-investing world. A frustration was people didn't want to invest because it wasn't measurable. How do we measure impacts? But they're also trying to measure their financial return. There were a lot of people- and I think it's gotten much better in these last few years and that people are unconsciously moved by the compassion of what they're doing by being impact investors- but a lot of people are still looking for financial return. And they're not doing things that need to be done because there's financial return. Like, when I was at SOCAP in 2012, you look at like an island nation will go out two hundred miles around it's country and monetize the value of everything that's all the way down into the sea. That's compelling. That gets turned into currency today. But what about whole populations that right now, that in the last three years, have suffered immensely, whole populations in terms of life experience. Our goal should be everybody should have a completely mobile living experience available to them. So what about that lost value? What don't we monetize what value whole populations are going to create because they can do the things that we're doing, because they have that capability to do that. Why can't we base a currency based on that?

In our system, we're all trying to get to the holy grail of compound interest. We all want to make enough money so we can put it away and compound interest is going to make it so I don't ever have to work again. It's a mathematical, abstract concept tied to a piece of paper that goes back thousands of years. The value, and structure, it goes back thousands of years. These fortunes, family fortunes, sovereign fortunes goes back thousands of years. That's what people are still fighting over, you know, and getting access to it. When currency is created, it's created by banks and then it's disappeared when it comes back, or countries are doing it. So we need to be able to create currencies based on our value, not based on because it's going to make more compound interest money for me to live in this old system.

Speaker 2: I want to leave space to respond to John Steven if anyone wants to.

Michel: I just wanted to say a little joke. The dream of every capitalist is to become a communist. They want enough money that they can live without thinking about money. This is what they're doing. There have been opinion polls of Silicon Valley people, you know, these young people, these young geeks who do start ups. That's what they want. They want to make enough money to an exist strategy so when they're thirty, they can live how they want and not work. This is their dream, but it's only for them. It's not for the others.

Speaker 2: So we are probably all are following that dream. All the people that don't get there are because I don't have the aptitudes to be a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur. I can't be there but I'm still living that mindset in that system, I'm just not succeeding at that top level. One of the great things why I'm excited about being here is I used to live in that dream. I grew up in that dream, completely brain-washed and we all are. I can't believe the extent to which I was living a different life and I was seeing a different reality.

Speaker 6: I just want to put one quick thing in, and then make space for you. You were talking about how to measure the outcome of your impact investments. One of the things that intrigued me- I don't know how other people feel about it- [inaudible 00:37:34] when he was writing about he could imagine a day when instead of the London stock exchange you had all the tickers of friends who returned to the company and all the financial factors that you could compare- price to earning ratio- why isn't there a similar exchange that allows people to compare an investment in this organization in terms of social returns compared to this one. So, an audited way that you can go to an exchange and say, "Okay, this company they really have their heart in the right place, but they're just not really effective at creating social outcomes, so I'm going to focus on you."

John Steven: May I? Because I can answer to that. There are those measures being created. The impact measurement world is only about five years old, but B labs does a great job with it and they use a survey called, for short it's called GIIRS, G-I-I-R-S, it's a Global Impact Investment Ratings Survey. It's based on a credit model and it can measure, in many ways, it can measure companies for their social, or community and environmental impact, and compare companies across scales, so there's different scales for ESG. But it's only five years old, so it's not as sophisticated as econometric systems that are like a hundred and fifty years old. I'll say one more thing and then I will stop. At the Triple Bottom Line Investment in early January, I admit that a frustration of mine is that it still doesn't measure the impact of a company, that kind of over-arching top-down model. So I developed this way- and it's another way to do it. It's really from the heart. It's compassion, and I said, if a company can accurately articulate it's company's mission and it's vision, so the heart of the company- If it can accurately articulate it's vision, then it can internally generate an accurate impact measurement scale of whether- Because an impact is trying to create something. They're trying to make something happen. So if you can accurately articulate it, you can come up with a measure that can measure it internally that's useful for managers, the public, investors, and everyone else. It's like top-down, that's good to get a broad scale, but the individual and the human part of it comes from the vision and the mission. But you can still come up- we came up with actual metrics, numbers, definitely works.

Speaker 2: I want to ask people in the outer circle: how many of you are not employed? What I mean by that is not unemployed, but you don't receive a paycheck from an employer.

Speaker 7: Does that include Social Security?

Speaker 2: That includes Social Security, yeah. No, I mean, you're eligible. The government is not employing you.

Speaker 7: It's giving me a check ...

Speaker 5: But it's not employing you.

Speaker 7: So the question that I want to throw in the circle is, we're in this environment now where there are fewer jobs. I don't know if that's actually going to change. Fast company this past year said if you take the unemployed, the self-employed, the free agents, it's now more than half the workforce in this country, which is astounding. I went on my own in 2009, found that there's so many barriers to working by yourself. These attempts at forming networks so that I can offer a more broad suite of services to a client is very valuable, but the accounting mechanisms, the ways of working, have not really caught up. So one thing I'm excited about is the possibility of how small companies, and free agents, and selfemployed people can band together, not to create a corporation, and not necessarily to create a cooperative- though that can happen sometimes. I had my first conversation with one of these organizations based in the UK last week, and they do use open value accounting, and when you get invited and accepted into the organization, they're not trying to be a single firm or a consulting company. They are a platform-

Michel: Ecos.

Speaker 7: Yes, yes. Good guess. And what value you put in is not just your time or your effort, it's what are you knowledgeable about, what do you bring to this group? Do you have any services that you can add? I'm also excited about this because there's such a risk in being an entrepreneur. Like, I have no social safety net under me. I'm never going to get an unemployment check, and it's typically hard to find clients who pay you every month.

Michel: Join the club.

Speaker 7: That get's-

Michel: Can I say something ... ?

Speaker 7: I'm done.

Michel: I just want to give two examples of things that are happening- Sally: And I'm in line after you.

Michel: Okay. So this is a Dutch project. It's called the Bread Fund. Twenty five people come together. They put thirty Euro- like, forty dollars I guess- in a pot every month, which most people can do, at least in Europe. Whenever somebody is sick, they get seven-fifty Euro paycheck for the month. People keep- it's their money. It's actually not a common pot. But it's an engagement that that money in that special account goes to the people in your circle that need support. It works very well. It's growing very rapidly. It's not a state project. It's not a union project. It's just people like us who came up with that idea because they were going from one cash flow crisis to another and then they get sick and there's nothing there.

Speaker 7: It's a Bread Fund?

Michel: It's called a Bread Fund.

Speaker 2: Can I just jump in? That is a very common way of doing finances in a lot like south of the equator- like African communities. I worked excessively with the African immigrant refugee community in Chicago, and based on small ethnic associations, they're doing that. When someone dies and needs to get buried back home and there's a wedding or whatever, when someone wants to start a business, they've been doing this. Then the money just gets pulled out as seed funds or as emergency funds for certain whatever-

Michel: I mean, of course, the people who do the Bread Fund, I think they invented this, but this was very common in the nineteenth century in the labor movement as well, this is like, very common-

But it's time to wrap up, so I give you another example. This is called Friendsurance. This is a company, but I think it's a good idea. Again, people pool thirty Euro a month together, and they guarantee up to ten thousand euro health reimbursement, which means that the real medical insurance can be bought with fifty percent discount because all the small things are covered by your friends. You can do this through Facebook and Twitter. They have an application for that. Just showing that with some creativity, we can create these mutual support networks that we need and that the state is no longer providing. They should provide it, but they don't. In the meantime, we can't wait until we're strong enough. We have to survive, that's why we're doing this.

Speaker 2: So I'm making a facilitation decision to cut short a little bit of the unpanel, in order for you guys to start actually having conversations together. So we can get one World Café question in before we break for lunch. Ideally this process would have allowed a little more participation, but ... time.

Speaker 7: A slave to the clock. Speaker 2: Got to be a slave to the clock at one point or another, so ... Sally: What was the name of the UK organization? Michel: Ethos. Sally: Ecos? Speaker 7: ETHOS. E-T-H-O-S. Ethos.

Speaker 2: So, break into World Café.

Closing

A financial meta system that can support people.

The difference between scarcity thinking and abundance thinking

We live in a world Artificalliy scarce to share knowledge Sustainable economics law center. --- w We jave a system that actively foirbuds/

Markets

We have a scarcity engineering system. It makes omeghing that is naturally abundant into something scarce,

NGO way – heres a problem. We nee dresources to solve that problem. We carete a hierarchical organization to direct resources at the problem.

Here’s another way. There are enough people in the world with time, skills and energy who would be willing to work to solve that problem.

You create a commons and a platform that allows people to self aggregate and collaborate to solve that problem. It’s a whole new way of thinkingthat is based on seeing tings in abundance.. AS yo money, I need more.

How to get the movement tiobe bigger.

The fist=rst thing is rganizaing a commons festival.

All the people who do something for the common good could come together as citizens.

The assembly of the commons, by neighborhood, bu infinifity

All the people doing good things fo rteh supply chain could come together.

The Chamber of the Comons is all the people who are enaged in market activities but in an ethical way. Fair trade orgainzations, solidarity organizationsB corps, social entrepreneurs.

They are doing more than making money. We are making monet to do something good.

There is a chamber of commerce. But there is no chamber of commons’ To support whoever is advancing the agenda.

It’s not just about doing stuff on our own.

The labor mobemnt created mutualities, insuarnces unions…but they reached 20% of the population in the 1930s.

It took the welfare state to give that to the 100% pf the poeple--- not in the United States but in Euriope.

Disadvantage to the state doing tat…

Microecomocs of peer production

In peer production people are freely contributing to a common good. So they are creating a commons thrpiugh contributions. This is contributions creating a commons.

At the core of this new value system is a community, a community of citizens co-creating a commons and by creating a commons they create a community.

This is the core of the value creation in these new systems.

The commons is arund information, koeledge everything that can be copied easily and cheaply.

Commons is not amarket. Around it, there are a lot of services that need ti be performed bbyt my labor can be paid.

You can pay me because you nee dthat services. Theres a whle economy that grows around the commons.

What we need there… generative capital vs estractive capital.

New propert y and givernnance forms emerging in the United States - main laws of the commons.

“generative capital that co creates value for the common good and extractive capital that broadly impoverished the common good.”

What is facebook worth without 2 billion people exgjanging information on it? Nothing? Who makes the money? Facebook. How much do they give back to the people generating caital for them? Nothing.

There is some mon monetary vale --- no exchange vale.

We caret livelighgoods ..

We need to create an t=ethical economy.

The Wkikimedia Fundation..

This is a

Individuall and social autonomous…

Solidarity Cooperatives for soicla care… in Quebec

They are publicaly funded – common good institutions.

they are multistate governed and they oroduce social care.

When they reach a scale of 140 people they havce to create a new one.

We don't need hierarchy anymore to coordinate.

News society

Civic society is at the core because it has become productive

It caretes value by the citizens contributing to the commons.

Am ethical economy and a partner state.