OuiShare Fest is a non-academic event that took place in Barcelona and is connected to other similar events, like OuiShare Fest in Paris. It’s main purpose is to discuss and show new initiatives regarding the Sharing Economy. This was my first time that I’ve attended. Particularly motivated to assist to the workshop organized by the Making Sense EU project, and also to listen what is the perspective that BCN City Hall has around the Smart City discourse.
OuiShare is known as a non-enterprise oriented, but a community based organization. Beyond that, funding in the beginning of the project become from the main sharing economy companies, such as Airbnb. Nowadays, it remains, but in the Barcelona edition it won it main support from the Ayuntamiento.
I highlight this background because since the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, stated against the abuse of these kind of business and those related to Smart City discourse, many changes in Barcelona are happening around the scene.
One is the pushing for more startups oriented to Social and Solidarity Economy, rather than Sharing Economy. The first is based on a diverse exchange of goods and services, usually with alternative ways of money, trying to avoid rent and other abuses against local population. This fight between visions on the Sharing Economy is confusing because its terminology. It seems that most of the studies took place analysing the main companies, such Airbnb or Uber. But a common problem is that those companies doesn’t offer open data, or if they do, is just aggregated data.
Some authors argue that the model that they use is not Sharing but Gig Economy. Koen Frenkel, for example, he discriminates between On-Demand and Second Hand models inside the Sharing economy. The main difference is who and how is benefited and who loss in the middle. A lot of alternatives are growing that play in between these models. In this case, Boyd Cohen has a good analysis on what is going on in cities. From an Academic perspective, in Barcelona is working an Economy Collaborative Research Network that intend to address studies and share knowledge regarding the sharing economy.
The second perspective that Barcelona is addressing is Technology Sovereignty. Francisca Bria, the new CTO of the Ayuntamiento, showed her approach to it as a way to defend the data that the City Hall and neighbours belong to. She argued that not data should be open, but also algorithms, software used and infrastructure must be open to ensure sovereignty. The question on who owns the data is also depending on who owns the infrastructure. The concept of Data Commons bring an opportunity to embrace the openData movement with a big awareness on privacy by design.
The last important point is that we have to think about what problems we can solve in society from urban policy regarding technology. In place of think how to solve from technology, we must assume that technology provokes bias and discrimination on its implementation. For that reason, we must ensure that policies create an equalitarian scenario. One example on how are they addressing this is with Decidìm.Barcelona, based on the platform Consul and similar to Decide Madrid.
I think that this is a progress regarding the Smart City and Open Data movements that push local governments to a next level, ensuring social equality in decision-taking and not a centralised model based on privative software. A necessary step to create more human Smart Cities, based on distributed technology and enhancing capabilities of governments to embrace their own technology.