The sharing, collaborative and participatory economy: what are we talking about?

There is a lot of confusion between the sharing, the collaborative and the participatory economy. What do people mean by these terms? Take a look for instance at the Sharing economy on Wikipedia.

Here we propose our distinctions, based on experience within the Sensorica OVN and inspired from other peer production endeavors in operation today.

From the popular use of these terms, the semantic separation between the terms sharing economy and the other two seams to be greater than the semantic separation between collaborative economy and participatory economy. In other words, people tend to use the terms collaborative economy and participatory economy interchangeably, but sometimes in opposition to the current use of the term sharing economy.

When we speak about the sharing economy, we put the emphasis on resources / assets (material or immaterial) that are "shared", i.e. provided access to in non-transactional ways, i.e. are mutualized, redistributed or circulated, among agents, individuals and/or organizations, in a reciprocal way without a profit motive. In this context, sharing can be a gift (unidirectional transfer) or barter (bidirectional transfer). These transfers can be of ownership or custodianship, depending on the property regime of the resource / asset in question.

Agents share information among themselves about needs and offers, about the location (physical or virtual) of these resources / assets and about rules of engagement or terms of access and use. Resources that are in the commons and nondominium property regimes are meant to be shared, as well as those that are part of pool of shareables.

Can we say that sharing can also mean selling (monetary exchange) or renting (payment for use)? The term sharing is used somewhat abusively. It is a reciprocal relation, but in terms of market valuation, which is a narrow valuation metric, uses a generic currency as a means of exchange and tends to have less positive social externalities. This Harvard review states that sharing economy, when applied to multi-sided market platforms like Airbnb and Uber is a misnomer, and it concludes to replace it with the term access economy. Critics of the sharing economy also propose terms such as rental economy or micro-service economy. In essence, the term sharing economy was a marketing scheme initiated by platforms like Airbnb and Uber, to make user an policy makers feel good about their services, and to obfuscate their rent-extraction model.

The use someone makes of these resource / asset in question is, for the most part, irrelevant, as long as the integrity of the asset is preserved through the sharing process, and the access respects the basic rules of engagement. The use can be personal or part of a commercial activity and the provider can be an individual or an organization. Some digital services that facilitate access and transactions can be agnostic to personal vs commercial use, some of them use strict rules about that and cater either to individuals or organizations or both.

When we speak about the collaborative economy, the focus is mostly on the allocation of time and resources for a common output. More concretely, we think about people producing something together through a process that minimizes exchanges (often mediated by monetary currencies). In other words, in its purest form, no one is paying anyone else for doing something, and usually no one can monopolize the output. Classical examples are Linux, Wikipedia, open source software and hardware development, etc. There is a lot of collaboration and even cooperation in a traditional company setting, but everyone involved engages in an exchange process, trading skills/time for money. For this reason, this is not a collaborative economy example. There can be rules about how the output of a collaborative process can be leveraged by others to generate wealth. A good example is RedHat that offers consultancy, installation, and maintenance of IT systems built on Linux, which is an open source operating system, produced by the crowd (an open network). These rules come in the form of licenses, which range from no restrictions at all, to non-commercial usage. This concept of the collaborative economy can be extended to other forms of contributions, which can range from financial (ex. crowdfunding), to material (ex. sharing a 3D printer with a group to prototype something). In this case, making available these tangible and material assets constitutes a contributions, and their use is directly related to the collaborative activity, i.e. it is project/venture specific, unlike the case of the sharing/access economy where the type of use someone makes of the "shared" asset is most of the time irrelevant (can be personal use). Moreover, these tangible resources used as contributions don’t necessarily exchange hands in the process, there is no transfer of ownership and they are not rented, these resources are shared within the group for common use. There can be rules related to the redistribution of potential benefits based on these tangible and material contributions, which can take the form of public recognition (ex: “a big thank to such and such for having contributed with the physical space and the 3D printer”), or equity - a promise of future benefits, see Benefit redistribution algorithm.

The term participatory economy putts more emphasis on the process through which something is collaboratively created. It is about adhering or accessing this process, participating in it. The term partitipation used in this formula means that the process is open, it is up to the agent to decide, i.e. the process has very low barriers to entry or non (ex. the Bitcoin permissionless network) - more on openness. This is also the case of Sensorica for example. A traditional co-op can be the locus of collaborative production, making open source artifacts (material or immaterial), but access to participation in the process can still be invitation-based or conditioned by a strict filter (hiring process). This is how the Enspiral network and las Indias operate. Co-ops are not open or permissionless networks. The participatory economy is more a set of relations that grant access to collaborative production processes to anyone that can deliver, no other questions asked.

Both terms, the collaborative economy and the participatory economy apply to OVN model, because allocation of time and resources rests heavily on crowdsourcing and assets are preferred in th commons, nondominium or pools of shareables regimes. Moreover, access to the network and to ventures is permissionless.

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