{"id":42818,"date":"2023-10-20T15:24:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/why-the-sharing-economy-needs-a-democratic-revolution-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:24:00","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:24:00","slug":"why-the-sharing-economy-needs-a-democratic-revolution-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/why-the-sharing-economy-needs-a-democratic-revolution-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the sharing economy needs a democratic revolution – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The rapidly growing influence of Silicon Valley owners over sharing economy platforms is a troubling development. The growing strength and pervasiveness of these platforms means their owners have significant power to impose their visions of what it means to be a citizen or worker in cities across the globe.<\/p>\n
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Airbnb, for example, seems free to distort property prices and create a grey, unregulated market for short-term accommodation. Uber meanwhile continues to erode hard won labour rights and turns a blind eye to acts of discrimination committed by its drivers.<\/p>\n
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One way to combat this could be a sharing economy which is less concerned with making money, and more focused on creating social and environmental value. A proposed solution is to create a more democratic sharing economy. In other words, a sharing economy where the corporate owners are held accountable by the wider public, and users and workers govern platforms together.<\/p>\n
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But democratising the sharing economy is no mean feat. Research I\u2019ve conducted with colleagues at the Open University and the University of Leeds shows how platforms can work. But they also face the challenge of maintaining their democratic nature and not becoming centralised and more commerically-driven.<\/p>\n
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For-profit democratic sharing economy platforms are very few and far between (we couldn\u2019t identify any successful examples). So we turned to the non-profit sector and looked at Freegle, a democratically-governed UK offshoot of the Freecycle Network, in our study.<\/p>\n
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Freegle is a grassroots organisation which runs an online platform, very similar to Freecycle, which helps keep unwanted items out of landfill. The platform enables people to freely and directly give unwanted items such as furniture and electronics to others in their local area. Since being founded in 2009 Freegle has grown rapidly and claims to have approximately 2.3m users across the UK.<\/p>\n
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The promise<\/h2>\n
Freegle was established by hundreds of volunteers who left the Freecycle network. The volunteers left after a long running dispute with the central Freecycle management over the erosion of Freecycle\u2019s grassroots ethos. So, first and foremost, Freegle provides some promising evidence that democratic sharing economy platforms, at least in the non-profit sector, can emerge from well-established centralised platforms.<\/p>\n