OuiShare Fest 2015

Last week, I spend 3 days at OuiShare Fest 2015 in Paris. The third annual gathering of its kind, it brings together players of the Collaborative Economy movement. The event was subtitled 'Lost in transition?' and did the important work of evaluating where the different strands of this new economy actually stand.

It was my first contact with OuiShare and many of the key topics. I have to say I was really impressed by the three days. The location at Cabaret Sauvage was the perfect setting to both attend talks and constantly connect with people in between. I cannot recall a conference where attendees where in fact this collaborative and it was easy to make connections and learn from all the folks there. A warm Thanks to the OuiShare team for putting all this together.

The conference tracks explored the key topics of Collaborative Consumption (fka 'sharing stuff'), Crowdfunding (and cryptoequity), OpenSource and the commons, Makers and distributed manufacturing, future of work, horizontal governance, etc. While all tracks were pretty well curated, I was particularly interested in Sharing, Makers, Funding and OpenSource business.

Here are some notes, in no particular order:

1. It is all about the BlockChain. If you haven't geeked up on bitcoin, etherium, smart contracts and the blockchain, do so now (start here and here!). The promise of a trustless system to store any data is huge in a decentralized world. In fact, Lisa Gansky of MeshLabs referred to the blockchain as the next huge transformative force of the digital age. Personally, I still struggle with some technical scalability aspects of the hash game of the blockchain, but smart minds are fully enchanted so I'll go with it for now.
2. It is all about access capacity: Robin Chase's new book 'Peers Inc' lays out the concept where we can tap into the excess capacity by peers networking through professional platforms (the Inc). This is our path to higher utilization and a shot at a sustainable economic activity. I very much liked her approach and recommend the book.
3. Where is the money? There is an inherent conflict with the sharing economy's lateral approach and the predominant innovation funding model of VCs. While there are many crowdfunding platforms supporting many efforts, the largest players in the space are still traditionally backed startups with massive evaluations (the 1% owns the sharing economy, like it or not). A new approach pioneered by thinkers like Matan Field of Backfeed (and LaZooz) or Swarm or Koinify are cryptocurrencies and a decentralized participation model of cryptoequity. Very interesting trend there for decentralized collaborative organisations (DCOs). Essentially any contribution to an organisation can afford a share in the virtual worth in form of tokens, as long as the group itself defines the value.
4. The collaborative economy is spreading: Jeremy Owyang of Crowdcompanies presented his updated version of the 'honeycomb 2.0' to map out the rapidly expanding scope of how access capacity is used by sharing. Existing companies will quickly need to consider a strategy to play in this interconnected world as business moves laterally.
5. Makers between tinkerers and innovators: The maker movement sometimes gets trapped in the chasm between the personal creativity of FabLabs and the commercial interest in crowd innovation. Existing players try to tap into the maker movement with co-owned maker spaces, but there is no seamless and financially viable paths yet to go from individual creator to a scalable business. Both funding and intellectual property rights pose hurdles here.
6. We need to change our mindset: Apart from all the exciting possibilities of the new collaborative economy, there is a deep rooted understanding that we as individuals need to rewrite the narrative about our most fundamental beliefs. We are not simply consumers, we are creators, community members, collaborators and even giver of gifts - we have just forgotten it. Unless the mental process of our daily behavior is reformed to include the broader 'We', a transition to a robust new model seems implausible. This dimension must not be forgotten and might prove the hardest of them all.

See much more on OSFESt at #osfest15. Looking forward to next year already...

Transition to efficiency

Last week I attended a talk given by Prof. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsaecker on the subject "more prosperity with less usage of resources". A long term thought leader in the field of sustainability, specifically by political and economic measures, von Weizsaecker made the following very valid points:

• The world is going to fail on the vast majority of our climate goals and is now changing the discussion from avoiding the crisis to dealing with the consequences. Why did no one act?
• GDP and CO2 emissions as well as GDP and consumption of natural resources are strictly correlated. That's why all developed countries want to avoid emission reductions and developing countries want to increase their footprint. It raises the prosperity.
• We need to find a way to break this strict correlation and allow for prosperity that is clean and efficient on resources (a new "Kuznets curve"). More so, we need to not only convert existing developed economies but tunnel the emerging economies directly to that state.
• Despite the short lived "success" of fracking and shale gas (even larger fields drain in only a few years), carbon-based energy sources oil, gas and coal are dwindling and passed their peak points. There is no alternative to switching to renewable energy sources.
• However, even if we were to realize our currently defined climate goals and reduce CO2 emissions by 20% over 1990 levels, this would only account for a part of the footprint of a fraction of the worlds population. 
• Therefore, von Weizsaecker proposes, we need a solution composed of:
• 30% less CO2 emission from our energy consumption (i.e. more renewables)
• 65% less need for energy (!!!)
• 5% less prosperity (are we really happy with all the "stuff" we have?)
• Radical gains in efficiency are nothing short of a technical revolution comparable to our leaps into the industrial or information age (a 6th Kondratiev wave). It will require ingenuity, innovation and fresh thinking. Entrepreneurs to the fore front!
• In the past, most gains of efficiency have been negated by a drastic increase in use of a given resource. This is called the "rebound effect" or Jevons paradox, an old phenomena observed with many efficiency leaps. With LED lights being efficient (cost per lumen), we simply install a lot more of them and light up the planet.
• Therefore von Weizsaecker suggest to reflect the true cost of natural resources and commons in market prices by increasing their price as we become more efficient in their use. The destruction of nature must not get cheaper by technological advances, but more expensive. 
• Market actors must be rewarded for their efficiency gains and punished for their resource use. This will set in motion a spiral of innovation and efficiency and can ultimately lead us to a "factor 5" in efficiency.
• One pointed question stuck with me: "What can 1 kilowatt hour do for us?" As an example, how many kWhs does it take to lift a 10 liter water bucket (say 10kg) from sea level to the top of Mount Everest (8,800 m)? Have a guess and scroll down for the answer. 

While the situation remains clearly dire overall, I found his view inspiring putting the focus on radical innovation to achieve efficiency. Rather than (only) talking about solar panels, talk about all forms of efficiency gains in transportation, manufacturing, housing, etc. Instead of just policy, we need to think innovation (although I don't subscribe to the Cornucopian world view that technology will save us all anyways by divine right).

p.s. It takes only 1/4 kWh to lift 10 kg to the top of Mount Everest (with a gravitational constant of 9.8 on our lovely planet, 1 kg for 1 meter takes 9.8 joule or 0.002722 Wh so for 10 kg and 8,800 meters that makes 0.239556 kWhs). Now compare this to your next energy bill and ask if we are using or wasting all that energy...