Olivera Marjanovic as Part of Who Owns the World? PCC Conference at The New School 2019

Summary

Olivera Marjanovic at Who Owns the World Conference, convened by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School in November 2019. Marjanovic is a speaker for the Town Hall 1 – The Capital Conundrum panel discussion.

About This Town Hall
Without access to real capital, the cooperative digital economy cannot thrive. Platform co-ops around the world struggle to access start-up funding given that traditional venture capital is not appropriate for these enterprises. Various groups have received foundation funding. British cooperators are using the Community Shares Model, which allows them to benefit from tax incentives for startups. Adapting the Mondragon process, cities like Cleveland (US) and Preston (UK) follow an ecosystem approach to launching and funding worker cooperatives. Yet others explore ways of creating “user trusts” to democratize the Internet. Learn about diverse financial instruments and strategies that can help groups to launch an upstart without venture capital. Together with the International Cooperative Alliance, philanthropists, and communities worldwide, we need to urgently take bold steps to meet these challenges.

Professor Olivera Marjanovic (Ph.D.) is a currently a Professor at the University of Technology Sydney, and the former Deputy Director (2010 – 2015) and the Director (2015-2017) of the Cooperatives Research Group at the University of Sydney – the leading multidisciplinary research group in the area of CMEs in Australia. Through her applied research and innovative teaching, Olivera seeks to link data and analytics, processes, human-centric services, knowledge and technology in innovative organizations, including cooperatives & mutuals (CMEs) and more recently digital platform cooperatives. Her current large research grants include an innovative industry-wide Visual Atlas of the Australian Cooperatives (an online platform for mapping and visual data exploration of the history of Cooperatives in Australia from the early 1900s to today) and a world-wide study of Digital Nomadism and new forms of digital working.