Zero Hedge — 14 Women Sue Lyft, Claiming It Is Ignoring A "Sexual Predator Crisis" Among Its Drivers

What could go wrong dispensing with licensing?

Looks like the bugs haven't bee worked out yet. Roll out premature? The courts will decide.

However, public safety is chiefly a government responsibility. Was the political process corrupted in lax regulation?

Zero Hedge
14 Women Sue Lyft, Claiming It Is Ignoring A "Sexual Predator Crisis" Among Its Drivers
Tyler Durden

April Rinne — What exactly is the sharing economy?

When I first attended Davos in January 2013, I asked everyone I met if they’d heard of the term “sharing economy.” Ninety percent of people said no, 5% assumed I was talking about barter exchange, and the remaining 5% acknowledged new technologies and peer-to-peer networks were enabling emergent business models. It was difficult to find anyone who had used Airbnb or BlaBlaCar. Later that year I co-founded the Forum’s Sharing Economy Working Group with other Young Global Leaders, with the goal of building awareness, visibility and expertise throughout the Forum’s communities.

Fast forward to 2017 and the reality is vastly different. Not only is the sharing economy in the news daily, it also has spurred a growing – and at times mind-boggling – list of related terms. To many people, the sharing economy and gig economy are the same thing. But in fact, almost nothing could be further from the truth.

Unpacking the terms

As the sharing economy has grown, it has become a victim of its own success. Some people have charged that much of today’s sharing economy is not really “sharing”, an allegation that is partly right. While on the one hand, there are many platforms that espouse the true spirit of sharing – underutilised assets and building community – on the other hand, increasingly there is “sharewashing” going on: companies latching onto the term because it makes them part of a hot trend. Who doesn’t want to conjure up notions of community and cooperation?...

So what is the sharing economy? And how should we distinguish among the various “new economy” models in the headlines? Here is a summary list that will clarify the confusion and provide guidance to companies, policymakers, individuals and investors alike:

Cutting though the BS around one of the latest buzzwords.

The sharing economy is not black and white: it is a spectrum, and it is increasingly crucial to understand its different shades. Ultimately it will become simply part of the economy, without special terminology, but we are not there yet. Entrepreneurs, journalists, governments, and (perhaps most of all) users of and participants in these new-economy platforms have a duty to be clear about whether and what we are, and are not, sharing.

Most people don't do nuance well.

The World Economic Forum
What exactly is the sharing economy?
April Rinne, Shareable Cities

Oleg Komlik — The Intellectual Origins of Sharing Economy [Bucky]

Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller (1895 – 1983) was a renowned and influential American inventor, designer, systems theorist, and futurist. Fuller saw himself as a practical philosopher and worked to solve global problems surrounding housing, transportation, energy, ecological destruction, and poverty. During his prolific career, in his different capacities he lectured a lot and published about 25 books, stimulating and leaving a great impact especially on “geeks” of his time and their successors who have then engendered the Information Revolution from the 1970s onward. 

In the 1960s, Fuller developed the World Game, a collaborative simulation game in which players attempt to solve world problems and overcome the uneven distribution of global resources.

The object of this anti-Malthusian and anti-militaristic game was in Fuller’s words, to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”. Over the 1960s-70s, the World Game and its ideas diffused via workshops, seminars, conferences, and educational and strategic papers. 

The 1971 publication “The World Game: Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool” (open-access), along with the game instructions and charts, also included several Fuller’s talks about the essence of game. One of them, given in the US Congress in 1969, caught my eye....

Economic Sociology and Political Economy
The Intellectual Origins of Sharing Economy
Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE, Chairman of the Junior Sociologists Network at the International Sociological Association, a PhD Candidate in Economic Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University, and a Lecturer in the School of Behavioral Sciences at the College of Management Academic Studies

Runaway Capitalism Is Crushing American Workers — Mark Karlin interviews Steven Hill

Tradeoffs involved in the sharing economy.

To achieve that [efficiency], many of these app and Web-based platforms have set up the equivalent of a labor auction block - but it's an auction in which the lowest bids win. Freelancers and contractors bid against each other to win the job, and since the Internet is global, some of these labor brokerage websites put US workers into direct competition with workers in the Philippines, India and other places. The result is predictable: cheap, Third World labor undercuts developed-world wages. It's a race to the bottom, with many gig-preneurs complaining that, after the platform takes its cut and the workers subtract their expenses, sometimes they make less than minimum wage.

So companies like Uber, Postmates, Upwork and TaskRabbit claim that they are "liberating workers" to become "independent," "in business for themselves" and "the CEOs of their own businesses." In reality, the workers are vulnerable contractors, with no safety net benefits or job security, and they have little choice but to take ever-smaller jobs ("gigs" and "micro-gigs") and low wages while the company profits in what I call the "share the crumbs" economy.…

Truthout
Runaway Capitalism Is Crushing American Workers
Mark Karlin interviews Steven Hill, author of RAW DEAL: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers

David F. Ruccio — Share this!

Capitalism and the sharing economy.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Share this!
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics University of Notre Dame Notre Dame

John Robb — Here’s How to Build an Engine of Prosperity in Your Community

Here’s something EVERY community should have, but almost none do.

This isn’t a picture of a factory or cubicles in an office building.
It’s a makerspace. In this case, it’s the Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville, MA.

What is a makerspace? It’s a place where people in the community can go to make things....

Resilient Communities
Here’s How to Build an Engine of Prosperity in Your Community
John Robb

Link to makerspaces worldwide at bottom of post. There are a lot of them! Similar to makerspaces are tool libraries, which are now proliferating, too.

Reminds me of the free universities in the Sixties when all sorts of free courses where given by volunteers.

Joel Dietz — How to Build a Vibrant Open Source Community

One of the important principles when considering open source projects and related communities is there needs to be an ecosystem around the project for the community to thrive. This is to recognize the fact that sharing is hard work, and that to share things well requires an additional degree of discipline that is often not present in other contexts. Although most of these guidelines are derived from experience in the software world, they're applicable in many other places.

Shareable — Community
How to Build a Vibrant Open Source Community
Joel Dietz

Cat Johnson — The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy

Want to hunker down with some good, shareable nonfiction this winter? Classic titles of the sharing economy, includingThe Mesh and What’s Mine is Yours , are good places to start. If you’re ready for more, we’ve rounded up a collection of 10 new books (plus three bonus selections) for the hardcore sharer that delve into the inner-workings of collaborative consumption, sharing law, the cultural shift toward collaboration, the importance of community-building, and more.

Shareable
The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy
Cat Johnson