Juliet Schor

I came to this conference to talk about the research that I’ve been doing for the past five years on what is called the on-demand economy or sharing economy. And I have two messages from the more than 200 interviews and hundreds of hours of participant observation that we’ve done in this space. Number one, if you’re going to start a platform cooperative or something like it, make sure you get the value proposition right. That is, it’s got to be a value, and here I’m talking mostly about economic value, to the people that you want to attract to it. What we find in the non-profit space is that’s often missing. In the for-profit space, they’ve gotten it right and people are flocking. Second point, if you are interested in social justice, and that’s part of what is motivating you to be active in this space, then you should know that in the non-profit enterprises that we’re looking at, time banks, maker spaces, food swaps, one of the things we find is really high levels of race, class, and gender exclusion. People act in ways that reinforce their own class position or their own racial position, and they are much more problematic from the point of view of race, class, and gender than many of the for-profits. So, if you want to build a platform that attracts people across race, across class, and across gender, my takeaway point for you is start with the group of people that you want to attract to your platform. So, embody the population you want to be.