Online workshop for people who are interested in organizational design, commons-based economies and cooperativism.
The workshop is free of charge. Seats are limited, so booking is essential! Register your spot here: rsvp@supermarkt-berlin.net

Hosted by Rashid Owoyele and Ela Kagel

Summary 

In this workshop Rashid Owoyele will propose a design method to help organizations to build a commons-based economy around projects and initiatives. Co-host Ela Kagel will start the conversation by presenting SUPERMARKT as an example for an organization in a phase of transition. After mapping out the questions & goals that participants bring to the workshop we’ll create the agenda and start working in smaller groups around topics of shared interest.

What you will take away from the workshop: 

• Deeper understanding of commons-based economies and how to manage your project in a cooperative way.
• Introduction to a design method that helps you structure your thoughts and strategies around the design of your organization.
• Professional exchange with participants sharing the same interest.

Workshop context and content:

The Social and Solidarity Economy has emerged as a phenomenological grounding for questions around the potentials for shared-ownership and shared governance in areas previously unrealized or unimagined.

These include platforms as cooperatives, or platforms as commons but for these purposes are not only limited to platform companies nor technologies. Rashid’s research, which began with an intention to situate itself firmly within the exploration of design in relation to platform cooperativism, has led them towards a new approach of imagining businesses and technological platforms (or systems like ITC) as commons management institutions à la Elinor Ostrom.

Rashid’s dissertation seeks to bring together this range of topics into a design-related discourse and push forward a design-situated analysis of potential sites of intervention and actions more specifically. The goal of this approach is to avoid solutionizing before doing the important groundwork of researching and connecting with actual community identified needs.

This workshop is an opportunity to test both the methodology and the assumptions of Rashid’s research and to combine it with the lived experience Ela can provide from building and steering community spaces and projects over the last two decades. This will be complemented by the questions and ideas of the workshop participants, so that in the end we’ll have a tested blueprint for a design methodology that can be used for strategic organizational development.

Info about the co-hosts:

Rashid Owoyele

Rashid (they/them) is a Nigerian-American Transdisciplinary Designer and Social Innovation expert born in St. Louis, Missouri. Rashid holds a Master of Fine Arts in Transdisciplinary Design, from Parsons The New School for Design (2013), and a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Ethics & Design with a minor and certificate in Environmental Science and Health in Public Health, from Indiana University (2010).

Rashid, in addition to being a Scientific Research Associate at the Weizenbaum Institute, is a senior-level consultant in social innovation and has taught students in 8 countries from interdisciplinary backgrounds (MBAs, BAs, MFAs, and MAs) in courses and professional programs including but not limited to the following: History of World Urbanism II and Social Justice and Design, Parsons The New School for Design. Ideation and Innovation, University of Cincinnati. Participatory and Transformation Design, Design-Led Innovation, and Social Innovation at Design Akademie Berlin.

Rashid is currently finalizing their PhD thesis on cooperative principles in the future networked society – including platform cooperativism and the conditions conducive to distributed ownership of ethical production.

Ela Kagel
Ela (she/her) is a German Digital Strategist and Cultural Planner (M.A.) Ela is co-founder of SUPERMARKT Berlin and has run the space/ platform since 2011 as managing partner until today. She is also co-founder and board member of Platform Cooperatives Germany eG, an umbrella organization for emerging projects within the cooperative digital economy.

Together with Platform Cooperatives Germany, Ela has been working with various platform coop businesses as part of the Social Economy Berlin team of consultants since 2020.

Ela is an active member of the advisory board for both Circles Coop and SuperCoop in Berlin. She has been part of the program committee of re:publica conference for the business & work track over the past five years. Ela is involved in several impact funding committees as advisor and jury member for programmes such as The UnFound accelerator, IGP or aws Innovative Solutions.

Together with the team of Curatorial Collective for Public Art in Berlin Ela is currently developing a series of events to explore contemporary mindsets and cultures of self-organization and work in the cultural field. This project will be launched in September 2022.

How to sign up:

Please send us a brief note to rsvp@supermarkt-berlin.net and let us know what motivates you to participate. We will send the log-in details for the videoconference once your registration is complete. We look forward to hearing from you!

Photo by __ drz __ on Unsplash