PIE News. A public design project toward commonfare

The new poor are a group of people composed by precarious workers, working poor, NEETs, and people left behind by the safety nets, accounting for approximately 25% of the European population. Commonfare is a new collaborative form of welfare provision based on equitable governance and grassroots democracy, entailing the involvement of diverse stakeholders to facilitate the bottom-up emergence of collective practices tackling the needs of the new poor. The paper mainly describes the concepts and building blocks of the PIE News project, a public design project which started in July 2016 with the aim to foster the emergence of commonfare as an alternative model to satisfy the needs of the new poor. PIE news leverages on 3 pilots (Italy, Croatia, Netherlands) with grassroots organizations in order to create a commonfare model through the development of a Collective Awareness Platform and a Digital Currency tool. The network supporting the project is constituted by organizations that account for approximately one-hundred thousand social media contacts. These organizations include ethical banking, networks of associations, activists for basic income, and many others. Finally, the paper briefly presents some results of the project at one year from its start

Participatory design, beyond the local

This workshop aims at stimulating and opening a debate around the capacity of Participatory Design (PD) and other co-design approaches to deliver outcomes and methodologies that can have an impact and value for reuse well beyond the local context in which they were originally developed. This will be achieved by stimulating the submission of position papers by researchers from the PD community and beyond.These papers will be discussed during the workshop in order to identify challenges, obstacles but also potentials for scaling up PD processes and results from the local to the global.</p

Reconsidering online reputation systems

Social and socioeconomic interactions and transactions often require trust. In digital spaces, the main approach to facilitating trust has effectively been to try to reduce or even remove the need for it through the implementation of reputation systems. These generate metrics based on digital data such as ratings and reviews submitted by users, interaction histories, and so on, that are intended to label individuals as more or less reliable or trustworthy in a particular interaction context. We suggest that conventional approaches to the design of such systems are rooted in a capitalist, competitive paradigm, relying on methodological individualism, and that the reputation technologies themselves thus embody and enact this paradigm in whatever space they operate in. We question whether the politics, ethics and philosophy that contribute to this paradigm align with those of some of the contexts in which reputation systems are now being used, and suggest that alternative approaches to the establishment of trust and reputation in digital spaces need to be considered for alternative contexts

The Commonfare project. Designing to support grassroots welfare initiatives

This contribution presents the Commonfare / PIE News project, funded by the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 framework program, and the commonfare.net platform, which constitutes the main tool and result of the project. The core project objectives include the promotion of alternative and sustainable forms of bottom-up self-management of the resources, and the development of anti-capitalistic economic models and of participated welfare tools grounded in practices of sharing and cooperation by people and communities. To achieve this objective, social sciences and technology design are combined in a way that displays the potential of interdisciplinary work when focusing on collaborative digital technologies

Supporting social innovation through visualisations of community interactions

Online communities that form through the introduction of sociotechnical platforms require significant effort to cultivate and sustain. Providing open, transparent information on community behaviour can motivate participation from community members themselves, while also providing platform administrators with detailed interaction dynamics. However, challenges arise in both understanding what information is conducive to engagement and sustainability, and then how best to represent this information to platform stakeholders. Towards a better understanding of these challenges, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of simple visualisations integrated into a Collective Awareness Platform for Social Innovation platform titled commonfare.net. We discuss the promise and challenge of bringing social innovation into the digital age, in terms of supporting sustained platform use and collective action, and how the introduction of community visualisations has been directed towards achieving this goal

Ethnographies of Collaborative Economies across Europe

“Sharing economy” and “collaborative economy” refer to a proliferation of initiatives, business models, digital platforms and forms of work that characterise contemporary life: from community-led initiatives and activist campaigns, to the impact of global sharing platforms in contexts such as network hospitality, transportation, etc. Sharing the common lens of ethnographic methods, this book presents in-depth examinations of collaborative economy phenomena. The book combines qualitative research and ethnographic methodology with a range of different collaborative economy case studies and topics across Europe. It uniquely offers a truly interdisciplinary approach. It emerges from a unique, long-term, multinational, cross-European collaboration between researchers from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, anthropology, geography, business studies, law, computing, information systems), career stages, and epistemological backgrounds, brought together by a shared research interest in the collaborative economy. This book is a further contribution to the in-depth qualitative understanding of the complexities of the collaborative economy phenomenon. These rich accounts contribute to the painting of a complex landscape that spans several countries and regions, and diverse political, cultural, and organisational backdrops. This book also offers important reflections on the role of ethnographic researchers, and on their stance and outlook, that are of paramount interest across the disciplines involved in collaborative economy research