Introduction to Town Hall 5 – Distributed Governance as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019

Summary

Ela Kagel introducing speakers and guests to Town Hall 5 – Distributed Governance at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019.

About This Town Hall
Meet a group of entrepreneurial platform co-op founders presenting on enterprises that range in maturity, from emerging to well-established. They hail from as far as Turkey, Belgium, Finland, Spain, and Indonesia. The focus of the discussion is the governance of geographically dispersed independent contractors. Aggregating members and workers on a platform comes with unique opportunities for increasing participation and potentially also for distributed decision making.

Digital strategist Ela Kagel specialises in the intersection of society, technology and economy. Since the 1990s she has produced media art exhibitions, designed spaces for cultural exchange and helped establish digital platforms, networks and communities . She is a long-time collaborator and researcher at the Public Art Lab in Berlin. From 2009 to 2011 she was program curator for the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture in Berlin. While at Transmediale Ela developed the Free Culture Incubator, a series of workshops and events based on free and open culture. Central to Ela’s practice is supporting bottom-up initiatives deeply rooted in particular communities of practice. From this perspective, she also established and curated Upgrade! Berlin, as well as a number of commons-related research projects. In 2010 Ela co-founded SUPERMARKT, an independent hub for digital culture and collaborative economy. Ela is co-initiator of the #Platformcoop Berlin meetups. Since 2018, Ela is also board member of RChain Europe, a technology cooperative based in Berlin.