Positive Platforms

= "Marina Gorbis and Devin Fidler from Silicon Valley based Institute For The Future, identified eight principles of Positive Platforms design". [1]

Discussion

Devin Fidler:

"We cannot be passive bystanders to the future of work, hoping that current work platforms, as admirable as many of them are, can evolve into what we need as a country: positive platforms, which we define as on-demand work systems that are intentionally designed to maximize the benefits for everyone connected to them — including, and especially, their workers.

Our simple rule of thumb is that the positive externalities of these platforms can be designed to outweigh their negative externalities.

Collaborating with industry and policy leaders, we are now striving to ask the right questions about this technology — and develop the answers most likely to promote positive platforms.

Are There Standards That Promote Balanced Economic Development That Can Be Feasibly Adopted By Emerging Platforms?

We see great promise in pricing models that don’t commoditize individual tasks, but instead align the interests of the platform with its workers. For instance, a commissions-based model similar to how entertainment agencies operate, where an agency’s revenue is a flat percentage of their client’s earnings. Operating in this way, platform owners would be directly incentivized to maximize their platform workers’ revenue.

How Can New Work Platform Technologies Be Applied To Achieve Socially Positive Outcomes?

We are already seeing platforms that strongly suggest the answer to this is Yes. For instance, as much of the U.S. education system remains in financial distress (both for students and colleges), the crowdsourced platform Duolingo applies a Mechanical Turk-type translation work model that enables teaching languages to its users for free, with incredibly impressive results. (According to the company, there are more people learning language on Duolingo’s platform than in the entire U.S. public school system.)

Similarly, it is not difficult to imagine the immense matchmaking power of on-demand platforms being used to address issues like underemployment and even overall GDP growth, by more dynamically matching people to work and training opportunities.

These are very tentative answers, and much more research is needed. It’s our hope that industry and policy captains continue coming forward to work with us, sharing their data, wisdom and statecraft, so we can better cultivate this technology in a direction we all support.

Ultimately, our traditional corporate/organizational structures are themselves a technology — one that was mostly designed to coordinate mass industrial production. As digital platforms provide new ways of coordinating economic activity, they will upset many of our assumptions about how work and organizations “should” behave.

Our task over the coming decades is to amplify their opportunities while mitigating their challenges. Only together can we design new structures all of us can live with — and work in." (http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/20/what-we-need-to-know-about-on-demand-work-platforms-before-regulating-them/)

Upskilling through Positive Learning Platforms

Simone Cicero:

"I will continue using Airbnb as a reference example (as we did on framework launch), because I definitely think it’s one of the most well designed platforms around, and it sports an excellent learning path that participants can experience.

Phase 1 — Onboarding the Platform

The first phase of interaction with a Platform is, with no doubt, onboarding. Despite every platform is different, there are recurring onboarding issues such as understanding how the platform works, assessing your own gaps for participation and solving them, start transacting. When you enter the platform as a guest in Airbnb you experience the key onboarding challenge of making the first booking. Airbnb’s neighborhood guides, coupled with an impressively crafted soft coaching that the platform provides to newbies (embedded in the platform UX) usually helps Airbnb travelers off the ground. Later on, the platform holds for you the possibility to both: grow as a traveler (learning how to book faster and better) or evolve into a host. People also can signup directly as a host: onboarding as a host means basically make the first guest booking happen. The far-famed free professional photographer service that the company provides to eligible hosts helps them get started in style and is definitely to be considered part of an “onboarding service” targeted to hosts.

Phase 2 — Getting Better on the Platform

If you know Airbnb well enough, you’ll know that the company has an impressive set of support initiatives to ensure its hosts grow, get better and provide better experiences over time. City level meetups and even a worldwide festival called Airbnb Open aim at connecting hosts and encouraging learning and peer to peer knowledge and experience sharing.

Helping participants getting better and — therefore — help the best among them emerge from the crowd is a key feature of platform businesses. According to Tim O’Reilly analysis of platforms:

“when you open the market to an unlimited number of suppliers, you must invest in reputation systems, search algorithms, and other mechanisms that help bring the best to the top.”

In this frame, Airbnb Super Host badge, a badge that only the best performing hosts achieve, is definitely a way for participants to stand out of the crowd and leverage on their capabilities, performance and reputation.

How to become a Superhost: performance, experience, commitment.

Getting better, for platform participants generally means to “grow their knowledge, accelerate performance improvement, and hone their capabilities” according to Hagel. It’s a phase which is definitely focused on two major outcomes: learn how to make the best of the platform (beat the competition and accumulate trust and reputation), and develop new capabilities that can give you access to new opportunities inside or outside the platform.

Phase 3 — Catching New Opportunities

But what happens when participants get better and develop new capabilities? The third phase is mostly about making the most of the acquired capabilities, learn how to generate more value out of them and, eventually, align more with specific (and personal) interests and drivers. The most successful platforms provide participants with paths for the exploitation of the new potential they develop inside the platforms itself. Airbnb again gives us a clear example of this: the just introduced City Hosts feature.

City Hosts is a way for hosts to develop “immersive experiences”: thanks to this feature hosts can use several of the skills they acquired thanks to the platform (such as providing customer excellence, care, curation, timeliness, precision…) and combine them with their own passions and competences, creating compelling experiences in the context of food, craft, entertainment, exploration…moving from the hospitality layer towards unforgettable travel experiences, evidently climbing the value chain ladder and catching new opportunities of professionalization." (https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/platforms-are-engines-of-learning-4f7b70249177#.hop6azwth)

More Information

• Platform Cooperativism