Bio
Neal Gorenflo is the co-founder and chief editor of Shareable, a nonprofit that publishes the world’s leading online magazine about sharing and convenes the Sharing Cities Network. He is a pioneering speaker, consultant, and writer on the sharing economy, sharing cities, and the future of work. He assigned and edited the first feature story profiling the platform cooperative movement, “Owning is the New Sharing” by Nathan Schneider and the first platform cooperative explainer. Shareable continues to cover the movement and advocate for it in editorials such as, “How Platform Co-ops Can Beat Death Stars Like Uber to Create a Real Sharing Economy.” He is the co-editor of the sharing-themed books Share or Die, Policies for Shareable Cities, and How to Share. As a leader in the sharing cities movement, he advises mayors, social entrepreneurs, and policy makers around the world and is an avid sharer himself.
In his talk, Gorenflo will briefly explore why policy workers should collaborate with each other, the potential structure of this collaboration, and a few examples of how policy makers have worked together successfully in the past. There is a long and illustrious history across the political spectrum, around the world, and on innumerable policy areas of policymakers collaborating to advance their agendas. For example, much of the success of the Republican Party at the state level in the United States is due to ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a membership organization of conservative state legislators that draft and share model state-level legislation for use in state governments. Because of the tremendous influence of ALEC and other policy exchanges and think tanks in the US, it is probably not an exaggeration to say that collaboration is a prerequisite for the success of public interest policymakers who seek a fair, inclusive and sustainable platform economy.