Orsi in SF Chronicle article on Loconomics
May 24, 2014
Post Carbon Fellow Janelle Orsi was quoted in this article on the sharing economy.
From the article:
Loconomics provides an online marketplace and business-management software for entrepreneurs such as bodyworkers and psychotherapists. Bring It Local offers online crowdfunding tools for grassroots groups.
The co-op members – freelancers in the case of Loconomics; employees and donors in the case of Bring It Local – will own shares, receive dividends and have a voice in running the companies.
“Loconomics is like TaskRabbit if the rabbits owned the company,” said attorney Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Berkeley, who’s helping set up the business structure. “It’s not a platform for the rich to get richer, it’s a platform for reversing that.”
In hyper-capitalistic Silicon Valley, where companies and investors focus on a big payday, co-ops sound like a vestige of the counterculture 1960s. But as traditional employment continues to wane, worker-owned co-ops are making a comeback in the tech world as well as in other sectors.