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atxhack4change / 2016-project-proposals

June 3-5, 2016 @ St. Edwards University
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Ridesharing Co-op #9

Open jcklpe opened 8 years ago

jcklpe commented 8 years ago

Short description of the idea (140 character tweet):

Ridesharing app for a driver co-op in which, all drivers are owners of the co-op, and receive dividends from the companies overall profits.

What is your project concept or idea? What challenge or opportunity will it solve?

Ridesharing app for a driver co-op in which, all drivers are owners of the co-op, and receive dividends from the companies overall profits. Developers who build and maintain the app, administrator who vet the drivers, and marketers who help promote the app are also included as co-op members and receive an average market rate salary. Company wide decisions would be managed through democratic means.

Who will benefit from your project? Describe the humans at the center of the problem - who are they?

How would they benefit? Can you tell their story?

Do you have photos of them? Or quotes?

The "sharing" economy is by it's nature, exploitative. Uber and Lyft skim money from drivers, by acting as a middle man between them and their driver. They provide value in their app, but sharing economies scale more for labor than they do for capital.

The sharing economy tech is a natural fit for co-ops though. It helps coordinate and scale a large number of workers towards a common interest. Co-ops are also shown to have higher productivity and higher rates of job satisfaction than traditional firms. [1][2] The problem with co-ops, especially in tech, is the initial start up cost is harder to obtain. But since the big advantage of tech is it's ability to scale, once that hump is overcome, a more fair, sustainable, and efficient system can happen. Think of this not as a business, but a system which coordinates efficient human cooperation.

Also, thinking in terms of Prop 1, co-ops have more incentive to cooperate with their local communities rather than strong arm them.

image

Issue area(s) relevant to your project idea:

[Look at the right sidebar :arrow_upper_right: ! Do you see the Labels? Pick a few]

This is just an idea. Similar concepts have been talked about a lot in open tech circles but I haven't actually seen any successful examples of it implemented yet, and with the recent Prop 1 discussion going on, I thought it might be a good fit for ATX hack

Tell us about yourself.

What is your background? Why is this challenge important to you?

Are you representing a group in submitting this project idea?

I'm a UX Designer. I can code a little. My website can be found here: http://jack-a-lope.net/

This project is important to me because I believe very strongly in the value of labor, and the social justice of fairly distributed profits.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Participation and Productiviy: A Comparison of Worker Cooperatives and Conventional Firms in the Plywood Industry; Brookings Institute

[2] When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins; The New Republic

Rogue-Aider commented 8 years ago

Hi, some friends and I were just talking about this idea and then I saw your post. Have you looked at similar projects in other places? For example (http://www.shareable.net/blog/cabby-owned-taxi-cooperatives-on-the-rise) and (https://www.gofundme.com/peoplesride).

A big challenge seems to be that most people view the ride-sharing as a service that they see Uber and Lyft delivering quite competently and at a fair price.

Do you see a local ridesharing coop as trying to challenge Uber/Lyft or just providing a more ethical alternative, like a Wheatsville Coop (name idea: Wheelsville?)

mateoclarke commented 8 years ago

@thedonquixotic, love the idea! Added some labels based on your response.

jcklpe commented 8 years ago

@Rogue-Aider I think I've seen the Shareable thing. I think the problem with a lot of these programs I've heard of is that they're tied to unions and the taxi paradigm. I'm not anti-union by any means (I think software devs should have maybe considered unionization previously), but I think the strength of the TNC services is that they're more agile and able to have a wider range of involvement from their drivers. A person can drive a little, or a lot, or sign up try it and then just gradually quit. A Taxi Union focused approach requires membership, dues, a cooperative owned taxi. etc. These are strengths of the TNC service, and they make it able to respond to demand better. Things like surge pricing creates a market that users can organically respond to. Taxi services are still a traditional job, and they can't always respond as well (I don't know exactly how shareable works but it sounds like a pretty standard taxi hailing app, so I assume that people work shifts, according to schedule rather than according to demand).

I think the big draw to me for this project is seeing it as a more ethical way of doing business. I think the edge for the consumer would be primarily ethical, but I also think a co-op service would draw a higher quality of driver, since it's a profit sharing model, and therefore would give people a better return. (I've also gone back into the paragraph and added more information on co-op productivity studies)

This is sort of a blended model, because it could use ideas about markets and demand, while also trying to give workers a more fair deal. I think of it as being sort of like an open source ethic applied to labor. Stuff like Mozilla is open source, but also was built on the bones of a for profit company. I think the biggest hurdle is how to actually implement this idea, is more on the biz dev side of things. If people wanted to move forward on this project at the hackathon, we should probably focus on making a decent non-functioning prototype (since a networked market like Lyft or Uber is probably a pretty big architecture project) to demonstrate the idea, and then do some research to solidify the value and realism of the co-op actually becoming a thing. That requires some expertise I don't have, namely in biz dev or co-op or law stuff. I understand the theory of co-ops but don't actually know much about what it takes to start one in Texas, or Austin in particular.

jcklpe commented 8 years ago

Also as far as names, a friend suggested Fellow Traveler which I think has a nice history and ring to it, but is much too long for a TNC app. Whatever the name is it needs to be short and easily verbed (like I'm going to grab a Lyft, or I'm going to Lyft over to you).

jcklpe commented 8 years ago

Well, I guess this project just got more relevant tonight haha

ssharif1 commented 8 years ago

ACTION NEEDED

Hello Project Champion,

Please provide the following: Full Name + Email Address You can comment here or send to ssharif1@stedwards.edu

We are going to be sending out a note + newsletter to our 345 (as of May 18) attendees sharing our submitted projects before the event and your hackers will want to know who you are. Additionally, we have PC-specific communication that we want to make sure that you are included on.

Thanks, ATX H4C Staff

steveblackmon commented 8 years ago

@thedonquixotic I'm interested in working on this project provided the team opensources it's work. Are you championing ?

steveblackmon commented 8 years ago

I submitted the following to the event organizer:

Short description of the idea (140 character tweet):

Prototype technology capable of connecting citizens operating vehicles and citizens seeking rides nearby directly in real-time, presenting pertinent information about each party as they volunteer it.

What is your project concept or idea? What challenge or opportunity will it solve?

The largest multi-national transportation network carriers (TNCs) have ceased operations in Austin. This is unfortunate for many reasons, but need not prevent drivers and riders from connecting and transacting within the parameters of the law. We propose bootstrapping a technology platform, freely available for anyone to inspect, build, commercialize, and modify under a fully-transparent community-driven process.

Who will benefit from your project? Describe the humans at the center of the problem - who are they?

How would they benefit? Can you tell their story?

Do you have photos of them? Or quotes?

Issue area(s) relevant to your project idea:

What is the current state of your project idea?

Tell us more about the current state of your project idea.

Do you have any links to news articles, text, mockups, code, or data?

There are many good open-source platforms suitable to build this domain-specific application upon, including but not limited to:

I'm not aware of any open-source platforms that solve this specific problem, but if any were identified we'd consider adapting and improving them.

Tell us about yourself.

What is your background?

I am a software developer and entrepreneur who believes in the power of open collaboration to solve technological and societal problems.

Why is this challenge important to you?

Affordable, efficient transportation throughout the Austin metro area is too important to leave up to government or to corporation owned and operated outside the area whose interests are not aligned with those of our citizens.

Are you representing a group in submitting this project idea?

I represent a handful of individuals who share this perspective, but no existing organization with any commercial interest in transportation.

jcklpe commented 8 years ago

Hey @steveblackmon : We already talked by email but just wanted to say here that I think this sounds great! I have another project proposal I put forth, and I'd love to help out with this still but it sounds to me like you have a better grasp of the technical challenges ahead, so I'd be happy if you championed this. Let me know how I can be of service!

Hey, sorry, just saw this @ssharif1 For some reason github didn't send me an email. I've sent you the info, hopefully it's everything you need!

mateoclarke commented 8 years ago

It sounds like @steveblackmon is taking the lead here, right? As long as this project has a lead(s), project has been accepted!

Now that your project has been approved, here are some things we suggest you do next: https://github.com/atxhack4change/2016-project-proposals#once-your-project-is-accepted-here-are-some-things-we-suggest-you-do-next

You will receive an email in the next few days asking you to confirming your speaking slot for the Saturday morning pitches.

Please let us know if you will no longer be able to champion this project at the hackathon.

danielhonker commented 8 years ago

@thedonquixotic - you should have received an invite to join Slack. If you haven't already joined the team and seen the Slack channel for your project, it's #rideshare-coop. We'll be sending out an email with details on pitches soon.