Sharing, Solidarity & Sustainability
“Do you feel that work and play should not be mutually exclusive?” I’m not gonna lie—this is long. But if you want a real insight into the perils of working as a freelancer in the app economy, it’s worth it.
In SF and have an idea about how to solve the city’s homeless problem? Check out this Hacktivation, scheduled for the last weekend in March. (Protip—equipping the homeless as wifi hotspots is a non-starter.)
This borrowing shop exemplifies what’s best about the sharing economy, IMO.
How is our use of apps and shared vehicles to get around going to change the way that cities plan? Here’s one theory.
Reputation, Reputation, Reputation
Can micro finance help Americans who lack credit get access to capital?
I’ve been wondering how long it would take for someone to come up with the idea of aggregating all your online ratings on various marketplaces into one score. erated claims to have done it.
From Partners
Here’s a call for papers/proposals for what sounds like a really interesting conference that the New School is hosting in November 2014. “Digital Labor, Sweatshops, Picket Lines & Barricades.”
Last week, I went to a very interesting meeting about the future of work (as did many of you!). One of the things that struck me about it was how many people mentioned a universal basic income as a possible solution to income inequality in the future. If you’re interested in finding out more about that, you might want to check out this conference in Montreal, this summer.
One thing that meeting made me wonder about was whether anyone has studied what the rate of pay inequity is, in worker-owned co-ops, seen through the lens of gender and race. So far, just one study has cropped up—which only deals with gender. Anyone who’s got more academic research on this topic—please send it along!
Organizing Theory
If your state legislature let you edit proposed laws via wiki, would it spur citizen engagement? This California Assemblyman is experimenting with just such a plan. On a related note, this NJ congressional candidate is crowd-sourcing his campaign platform on GitHub.
You want to change the world by telling stories? Medium wants to help. They’re looking for 10 do-gooders (c3 status not required) to help out with professional told & photographed stories.
Geeking Out
I’ve finally found my people…hello, technoprogressives!
NASA study of income inequality says that math leads them to only two outcomes: socialism, or societal collapse. But don’t worry, either way, you likely won’t live to see it.
What’s Going On in the Workforce?
Interested in how to succeed as a Mechanical Turk? Peep this thread on Reddit, which is full of helpful tips.
Caregivers beware—while some scientists think it’ll be a long while before we’re able to program social intelligence into robots, others are planning to have robot housemaids for the elderly soon.
Are you trying to make product decisions with a distributed workforce? Or just want to increase worker input on organizational decisions? Try using this new service, Agora, that gives more options to the crowd.
Check out this new documentary about the working conditions of adjunct faculty and precariously-perched academics.
Would you let your employer monitor your sleep, if it was under the guise of making you a better employee?
Incredible look at how the South Korean diaspora fueled the volatile “fast fashion” industry in the Americas, through first- and second-generation immigrants.
Final Thoughts
“No social movement, no matter how liberating, can bring permanent happiness to the people it touches. We grow old; we lose loved ones. We fall short of our greatest goals and fail to live up to our most optimistic visions of our own character. When history opened up to American women in the late twentieth century, it did not offer them permanent bliss. It gave them an opportunity to face the dark moments on their own terms and to exalt in the spaces between.”
Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present