Collaborative economy

The collaborative economy is defined as initiatives based on horizontal networks and participation of a community. It is built on "distributed power and trust within communities as opposed to centralized institutions" (R. Botsman), blurring the lines between producer and consumer. These communities meet and interact on online networks and peer-to-peer platforms, as well as in shared spaces such as fablabs and coworking spaces.

Distinction between the sharing economy and the collaborative economy

Some people use the terms sharing economy and collaborative economy interchangeably, which results in the erroneous inclusion of some practices, economic models and organizational models in the category of the collaborative economy.

Some suggest that the term collaborative economy refers to a larger category which includes practices and models previously subsumed under the sharing economy category. Sharing (a reciprocal relation) occurs in collaborative processes, especially when these processes make use of physical and digital assets that are put in common (mutualized) by collaborators. At the same time, some have argued that the term sharing economy has been abusively applied to organisations like Uber and Airbnb. Such models are better described as a platform for facilitating access for renting excess capacity rather than sharing excess capacity. Giorgos Kallis has proposed the label of rental economy In The Sharing Economy Isn’t About Sharing at All, Giana M. Eckhardt and Fleura Bardhi have proposed the label access economy:

Sharing is a form of social exchange that takes place among people known to each other, without any profit. Sharing is an established practice, and dominates particular aspects of our life, such as within the family. By sharing and collectively consuming the household space of the home, family members establish a communal identity. When “sharing” is market-mediated — when a company is an intermediary between consumers who don’t know each other — it is no longer sharing at all. Rather, consumers are paying to access someone else’s goods or services for a particular period of time. It is an economic exchange, and consumers are after utilitarian, rather than social, value.

In contrast, collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature — by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group. In particular, teams that work collaboratively can obtain greater resources, recognition and reward when facing competition for finite resources. Collaboration is also present in opposing goals exhibiting the notion of adversarial collaboration, though this is not a common case for using the word.

Platforms such as Uber and Airbnb, which have been previously mislabeled as part of the sharing economy, cannot be included into the category of the collaboratively economy. As some have argued that there is no real sharing in their practices we can also argue that there is no real collaboration in their practices.

• Uber drivers compete for clients.
• Drivers and those who seek a ride maintain a client-service provider relation.
• The platform is privately owned and managed to optimize profits, users have no control over it, although they might exert some degree of (soft) influence.
• Uber is a controlled marketplace (with prices fixed by algorithms rather than pure supply and demand) for short-term car-ride rental, where drivers are motivated by the profit they can make from short-term car- ride services and Uber, owning the platform, is motivated by the profits it can make by extracting a percentage from every transaction between drivers and those who seek a ride.

External links

• Discussion on coordination, cooperation, collaboration and mere social at the p2pFoundation