Partners update!

We've found amazing partners along the way. And we are very happy to share it with you.

We’ve found amazing partners along the way. And we are very happy to share it with you.

SmartIB is based in Spain. It is a cooperative whose objective is to foster creative and cultural projects, offering advice and support to the members to develop them, training to improve their skills, and mutualized services so they can develop their professional activity in an appropriate legal framework.

P2P Models is trying to facilitate some aspects of their activity with digital tools, co-designed with the members of the cooperative and in co-creation with the IT team. We listen to member’s needs and desires and try to give creative solutions based in blockchain.

Our first contact was in December 2018 and since then, we have had a very good relationship with the community. We have met partners from the Madrid node and other within Spanish territory. We have carried out our first social research (based on interviews and participant observation) followed by some wonderful co-creation workshops!

The needs and desires we have located in SmartIB could be summarized in greater cohesion in the community, creation of a stronger professional network, generation of a more quality employment and above all,  giving a greater visibility to the artistic and cultural sector.

The needs located in SmartIB are greater cohesion in the community, creation of a stronger professional network, generation of a more quality employment and above all,  giving a greater visibility to the artistic and cultural sector.

We are focusing now on our next steps! Which are the development of a first tool or minimum viable product for the community to test and the continuation of research to achieve a deeper knowledge of it, in order to be the tool for them to achieve their goals.

Amara is a project of the Participatory Culture Foundation, aiming to make online content accessible. The Amara project provides an open and collaborative platform for the creation of subtitles drawing on the power of crowdsourcing through volunteer engagement, such as those of TED talks. Starting in 2015, Amara On Demand was created as part of the Amara project to offer the possibility of hiring on demand services for the creation of subtitles and translations. In this way, linguists are remunerated for tasks such as subtitling, translating, captioning, and reviewing videos and text files.

In Amara, over the next months we will explore new ways to allocate tasks and remunerate work according to the community needs.

Our goal is to experiment what are the consequences of gradually shifting the power of decision-making (governance) of the rules that determine the distribution of value to the members of crowdsourcing communities. In this way, we want to explore and contribute to the development of worker-centric crowdsourcing platforms, while also contribute to improve our understanding of how crowdsourcing platforms might support social relationships in these contexts rather than just capitalise them. In other words, we are taking an action research approach to develop blockchain-based crowdsourcing platforms in which instead of crowd capitalisation models (e.g. Amazon Turk), in which the producer is seen as a random passive object ; we foster relational crowd models: where the producer also is the consumer and the owner of the means of production, and the product is an expression of self-realisation.

We started our collaboration with Amara a year ago. During this time, we have carried out ethnographic research to detail the governance model, workflows, and collaborative processes of Amara on Demand. As part of this effort, Eve Zelickson has recently defended with honours her thesis “A Balancing Act: Hybrid Organizations in the Collaborative Economy Empirical Evidence from Amara on Demand”. Over the next months we will explore new ways to allocate tasks and remunerate work according to the community needs. In order to do so, we plan to collect more data through interviews, participant observation and organise F2F workshops with members of Amara.

AUTHOR

Genoveva López Morales. P2P Models Communication Strategist
Genoveva López

Expert in Social and Solidarity Economy and communication. Interested in possible futures to create post-cooperate societies.

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