{ "metadata": { "transaction_key": null, "request_id": "metagov:burnett-metagov-20240920", "sha256": null, "created": "2025-10-27T23:37:59.966847+00:00", "duration": null, "channels": 1, "models": [ "metagov-manual" ], "model_info": { "metagov-manual": { "name": "metagov-manual", "version": "2025-10-01", "arch": "manual" } }, "warnings": null, "summary_info": null }, "results": { "channels": [], "utterances": [ { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 0.0, "end": 0.0, "transcript": "I'm very grateful for the opportunity to to introduce Amy Burnett. Amy is is works on growth structures and skill development for North American innovation at Accenture focusing on communications, media, and technology industries. And she's been working on a research project from a as part of a a recent master's degree on strategic foresight and innovation. And she's been doing some really interesting thinking about workers' stake in value. And I know this is something that a bunch of us have been thinking about in different kinds of contexts. You know, we had a recent seminar on on labor in Daos. I I know a number of people in this community are thinking about how to connect ownership and governance and work. And so I was really eager to to draw Amy into this conversation. So the the title of of her talk is work for stake, reimagining ownership and work in the emerging Internet. Amy, can you take it away?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 15.0, "end": 15.0, "transcript": "Awesome. Yeah. Thanks, Nathan. Yeah. And full disclosure, I asked Nathan to to be an expert interview for my research. So that was kind of the connection between between the two of us that brought me here today. So I will kick it off. Just wanna make sure that everyone is able to to see what I'm sharing. If folks could just give me confirmation of that, that'd be great. Okay. Amazing. So my name is Amy. I like Nathan said, I'm a recent master's grad from a design program in strategic foresight and innovation from Toronto. And as an extension of my work, I've worked as a research assistant at OCAD University in Toronto, in their Visual Analytics Lab and also at the MIT Media Lab in their Poetic Justice Group. And then for the past eight years, I've also been a member and organizer of a lot of DIY communities, including some nonhierarchical creative production studios and co working spaces, as well as some mutual aid efforts, including encampment support networks. So this is kind of the perspective that I bring to my research, in addition to a point of view that I've honed as an innovation consultant working in IT professional services, where I I tend to bring together the business and user perspective to kind of scaling proof of value, products with technical development teams and helping people to stand up, governance models for innovation functions. We do a lot of operating models and organization design playbooks. And so this is kind of the intersection, at which I am sitting and kind of thinking through the challenges that, that I'm focused on in my work. And so, the intersection of my personal practice and professional work really led me to focus on this project that I've called work for stake. It's focused on applying some of the innovation methodologies that I use in my professional work, to help individuals. So where I'm typically working with larger clients, I think that there's a lot of utility in these sorts of tools, when we think about workers or or people. And so this, this research starts to investigate, barriers to ownership optimizing behaviors among workers. It thinks through some costs and risks and benefits of transitioning towards ownership and differences between employees and independent workers. And the hypothesis is really that experimenting with interoperable digital ownership tools can start to lead to some disruptive worker centered innovations that can, hopefully increase worker stake, which, which is kinda comprised of some capital ownership, capital income, and voice and decision making. And then for this community in particular, I tried to think through what value this work could bring for the folks on this call. And so I think it's really in the redesign of work related architectures towards alternative outcomes. So enhancing the agency for individuals and helping to kind of redistribute the value produced through labor, and also, to kind of contour a future of work that's powered by these sorts of governance and monetization tools and helps to kind of transition ownership more into the digital realm. So that is a high level overview, but I'm gonna get into the story behind the research a little bit. So within the DIY communities that I've been involved with, I started to notice a common cycle. Individuals who are interested in getting together to build alternative sorts of futures and communities, were building models to subvert or challenge the dominant economic system and they were often doing this in order to pursue increased agency and a greater sense of collectivity. But after the initial burst of energy or a few years of trying to build these communities, a lot of the members tended to find themselves in precarious and more economically disempowered positions. And so at this point, a lot of those folks tended to pursue independent projects with more of an economic incentive rather than continuing the collective struggle. And so this tend to look like, in my experience, the monetization of a skill in the labor market for fixed wages or in the form of a sole proprietor business. And then those same people would experience the challenge of achieving economic sustainability and satisfaction which tended to reignite the desire to build something new and increase their agency, return to more collective pursuits, and then that cycle kind of reinforced itself. So I started to find language for this tension in the work of Jane Jacobs' book, Systems for Survival of Survival rather. In this worksheet describes two moral frameworks that govern society and so one of those is, is more focused on commerce, which she calls the commercial syndrome, and the other more on politics, which is the Guardian syndrome. And so this diagram sort of depicts a hybrid of the two, where they mix and tend to lead to, less than empowering outcomes over time. And so I started to wonder, what might balance this reinforcing loop? So how could the people in the communities that I was part of, retain their ideals, their political ideals of collectivity and agency, in their work while also meeting their survival needs and gaining the resources that they needed in order to enact the change that their ideals were driving them towards. And so where many people in the self organizing bottom up communities I was part of prized those political values, I wondered how they could increase at the same time the sustainability of the vital initiatives and communities that they were also building. So kind of at the same time, as" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 30.0, "end": 30.0, "transcript": "I was noticing this phenomenon within my own communities, I was starting to see conversations like the one I've I've captured" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 45.0, "end": 45.0, "transcript": "a screenshot of here emerging from more venture based technology space and building on the work of economists like, very popular economist Thomas Piketty, and started kind of noting those as clues towards a potentially promising design pay design space. So in this instance, what this is kind of calling out is that working for a fixed wage and linear returns on work is starting to put workers exponentially behind those with ownership of an access to capital assets or income. And so owning the stake owning a stake in the projects towards which one gives and commits their time, energy, value, labor has the potential to scale with value created in a way that fixed wages don't. And so, in the research that I also conducted, participants responded unanimously negatively, when asked about the the words and emotions they associated with the work for hire model, which suggested to me that the lived reality of those conditions is also something that workers themselves are finding unfavorable. And so as I kind of continue following these threads, I began to form the hunch that ownership could balance that reinforcing loop that I discussed earlier and started to understand, that workers' ability to sway their work environments and serve their own interests, reaping the full benefits of their labor as key stakeholders in value creation was contingent on an ownership stake. And so I began to see ownership as a powerful avenue for starting to solve many of the challenges that workers were facing in the modern labor economy, because those shares increase in value over time. And so there's the outcome of wealth and security for workers, in a way that's different from the dominant model today, which is sort of that corporate centralization of of power that rewards the already successful. And so workers really stand to gain more equitable working environments, higher wages, higher net worth, and lower rates of job precarity during downturns. But then on the flip side it also has a benefit to all the stakeholders because for employers and enterprises there's the alignment of incentives, there's proven acceleration and productivity growth and and longer term enterprise survival. So this seemed like a powerful potential intervention to explore. And the hypothesis of this research is really that worker led experimentation with interoperable digital ownership tools can help lead to worker centered innovate innovations that can increase that worker stake that I talked about a little bit earlier. Giving them greater voice in key decisions, greater access to resources within the enterprises and communities for which they generate value over time. And while the ownership, ownership as a concept has been associated with improved work related outcomes and and that's been well explored, I think the nuance and difference here is that, there are these new and increasingly powerful digital tools and technologies that are now really easily accessible to workers. And while digital technology stacks have been leveraged already in spaces like the creator economy for some time now, The differentiating factor between those and the emerging set of tools made possible through rev three technologies like blockchain really makes this ownership layer possible in a new way. So so digital ownership, I think, is becoming increasingly feasible opportunity for workers to kinda get involved with the capacity for the to transform users into owners using, technological and financial tools continues to emerge in what some people are calling the Internet of ownership. And ownership is really starting to become a keystone of experiences across lots of categories and software products. And the interoperable low barrier nature of these tools is starting to signal a world where ownership can become digitally integrated and accessible even for people with no or low technical capabilities. And I think that this is likely to continue. So there is a there's a market incentive that drives businesses to push prices down in order to capture the largest market, and get to the most amount of people. And so I think it's worth assuming that this kind of accessible, powerful software trend is here to stay. And then I think on the other side, there's also the growing ability to do more at scale with less. This phenomenon is reshaping the labor market from the top down, and kind of creating a labor market that's starting to feel a bit like a game of musical chairs. So with jobs being eliminated that are not likely to return. And so with this being kind of a double edged sword, I think it's being kind of a conversation that's emerging is that ownership needs to become an explicit economic strategy for workers to start to slow this vicious cycle of compounding precarity that is being accelerated by technology. And so I've begun to believe that the time for bottom up worker led experimentation to start to secure their own futures has arrived. I did, using strategic foresight tools, a trend analysis of some broader labor market trends, and I feel like this sort of affirmed that hunch. And so looking at the four key vectors of change that this research brought forward, it really suggests that the systemic kind of top down challenges that workers face need something different than a wait and hope sort of approach. I don't think these things are gonna deliver on the time sensitive needs of workers in the ways that would be most important. And so as as equity becomes increasingly centralized, as job security becomes harder to find, as the use of technology intensifies working conditions, and as the composition of the workforce shifts along the lines of geographic, demographic, and employment factors, it really feels like there are new approaches to common problems that are starting to be required. So to summarize the research, despite despite rapidly changing context and declining worker outcomes, behaviors generally are remaining static. So the dominant model of employment in Northern America is still the work for hire model, which means that most workers are still working for a fixed wage and don't necessarily understand" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 60.0, "end": 60.0, "transcript": "how" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 75.0, "end": 75.0, "transcript": "to put new technologies to use for themselves or how to think creatively about constructing work lives that better serve their own unique needs. And furthermore and this is kind of affirmed by some of the research findings, workers aren't seeing the growing risk inherent in the in the current model as it starts to move towards leaner, cheaper, and more on demand forms of employment. And so I believe that workers need new visions of the future worth working towards and transitional models for how to get there that include ways of organizing towards better outcomes. Workers are also not optimizing for ownership, presently. So membership in co ops and businesses continues to decline, and less than a quarter of workers who have ownership options in their companies have actually exercised them. And so I think another piece of this is that it's critical for workers to start to understand the opportunity that they're leaving on the table and to start takes taking seriously their role in mitigating the centralization of ownership. The goal of the research is really to clearly frame the shifting landscape of work first to understand where levers for change exist. And then second, to deliver the most impactful support for catalyzing worker led experimentation with the goal of increasing stake. And just to touch on some of the terms here, levers for change is a word that comes from Donella Meadows, who's a very well known systems thinker. And it refers to places in a complex system where a small change in one thing can produce a a broader change at scale. I think to improve worker outcomes in a labor market that's fraught with challenges, we need new mental models, which is one labor for change. And that includes new scenarios, new imaginaries, new ways of realizing them, and and those need to feel plausible and inspiring in order to compel people towards change. And then the second lever I've explored through this work is system structures. And so these include tools, ways of operating, and ways of organizing that can enhance worker value and competitiveness and also increase their access to decent and secure work. So to sneak up on my my big research question here, which is how might workers use composable online tools to enable ownership driven change? I started with some smaller ones that asked about how do we encourage ownership optimizing behaviors, how can we support successful experiments with new technology? And how can we understand the barriers and benefits for different worker types and risk profiles? And then I've mapped those to the research outputs that I that I deliver in this work here. And so what I'll walk through today is kind of a future of work concept that helps to frame up the ownership opportunity, a bit of a transitional map that helps to show people and give them a mental model for how to start to work towards this different sort of work life. And then the beginnings of an ownership playbook, that I that I hope to further refine and develop in in subsequent phases of exploration. The core this this region is kind of constructed of a few different activities. So I conducted an ecosystem and solution scan to start to articulate challenges, opportunities, and in place solutions to inform the future of work concept. I also conducted participant research with the end workers, which I have defined here as under the age of 35. And they were engaged in some cocreation sessions as well as some pre and post session surveys to be able to kinda do that comparative analysis of their perceptions before and afterward. And then the one thing I would call out here is that given the small sample size, I have validated directional findings and insights with experts in the field and then cross reference them against, broader literature review in order to substantiate some of the findings. So I'm gonna jump into work for stake. So now I'm getting into kind of some of these concepts and and how they they came out after doing the research. I really see work for stake as a provocation for workers. I think it provides the broad contours of an alternative vision of work related to decision making and exchange. So the way that I've defined work for stake here is as a constellation of work relationships that optimize for partial stake in an enterprise project or work product in exchange for labor or value produced. Work for stake is enabled at scale, I think, by emerging technologies. And the target state of this concept is a set of viable working relations wherein workers and value producers share in the profits and governance of their organizations, products, and projects within which they work. Work for stake is is, like I said before, a direct response to key challenges that workers face. And so the six core tenants are informed by a scan of working solutions that respond to similar challenges with some success. So that's kind of looking across the ecosystem and understanding, you know, for the the key challenges workers are having, where are some solutions starting to point to, new avenues and and new ways of working. And then by a trend scan to also understand the potential trajectories as we move towards the future. So each of these components, I think, represents an area for experimentation. And so there's kind of the opportunity to create value by sort of playing and experimenting in each of these different sort of pillars of the concept. Work for SEGA is built on technologies that enable micro financialization through data and information flows as well as the use of the low barrier tools and platforms, that allow people to both build and monetize. It requires the establishment of continuous learning processes and an awareness of implication of personal value. And then it also advocates for a portfolio based approach to work and peer to peer models of organization. I presented this concept to workers in the co creation sessions and asked them to react to their first impression of it, immediately when they they came into the workshop. And the words and, feelings that they associated with the concept, were analyzed and found to have an 80% positive sentiment score. So to me, this suggests that the concept is a compelling vision of the future for workers, and that is in comparison to the unanimously negative sentiment I kind of alluded to before related to the fixed wage work for hire model. And so I think while workers did find the concept appealing, they were unclear on how to operationalize it. And so to understand how likely or unlikely workers are to shift towards these more ownership optimizing behaviors, I applied a framework called BMAT, which stands for behavior, motivation, ability, and trigger. And this is a tool that's commonly used to understand what might motivate a person to adopt a new behavior, and and to understand how capable they are of actually doing that. And so the survey responses help to indicate that, for workers, it's increasingly normalized for them to take alternative approaches to work, and they felt that the work for hire model was losing its fit with their modern needs and values. So it seemed likely that the social acceptance of concepts like work for stake, activated moderate levels of of motivation and did have a high potential for growth. But the gap here was really in optimizing for ownership around clear, accessible, and explainable pathways to change that aligned with their values that they expressed around convenience and ease. So, I think work for stake are similar concepts that sort of try to reshape how people approach work. I think in order to be operationalized in a way that makes incentives and returns clear, is important as well as articulating what the risks and relationships to current economic constraints that workers are facing, and making those clear. That increases their propensity to shift their actions. And so, this supports the call, I think, for an ownership playbook and that transitional map that I had originally outlined in my research approach. And the goal of these is really to help derisk and demystify that leap from what workers are already doing and familiar with to something new and different. And I think at this point, the question really becomes how. So how do we make the concept easier for workers to act upon and how do we begin to realize the benefits? The first, the first insight here is really in knowing what they own. So the journey from pre ownership to ownership status for both groups is enabled by four key ownership value chains. And so you can see those here. They're residuals, royalties, tokens, and employee stock. So I think the advice to workers here is really seeking out work arrangements or constructing work arrangements and engagements that offer one or more of these sorts of ownership opportunities and starting to embed those in their own models to see ownership driven rewards and returns. The second thing is knowing how to get there while acknowledging the risk inherent in that transition. I think work for stake is important to frame as one end of a continuum And so, workers can derisk that transition to this sort of future, which sits, you know, using using a a majority of those work for stake components and then also using value chains that help to secure an ownership stake. And I think that derisking this transition looks like moving incrementally towards those sorts of models. And to support that, I created a work portfolio generation tool, which you see here as a way to help stimulate dialogue and ideation around the sorts of returns that workers might expect as they begin to increase the degree of innovation or disruption of the status quo. And I did use this successfully in some of the participatory workshops. So I will show an example of some of the portfolios that people generated, but I also wanna call out that precisely because ownership does not typically provide fixed returns, returns can be variable in both positive and negative ways. So, you know, assets could depreciate, become obsolete, or fail to return the speculated value. And so I think risk mitigation was something that came up a lot. And I think something you'll see here is that none of the participant portfolios that people, propose for themselves were fully on the disruptive end. They spanned they spanned some of the more status quo sides of things as well to kind of help them feel secure in the short term, but also start to grow towards something different in the longer term. The young workers who participated in the cocreation session, I'm I'll give a little sense of how this worked. They identified the returns that they were looking for in exchange for their work. So we did a bit of ideation about what those returns could be. Some of them were brought forward already from the literature review, and then they started to map those against, this continuum. And so we start to see, that as we move away from the status quo on the left hand side, the ownership value chain start to get engaged. I think that these portfolios really represent workers' desires and and demonstrate, that they span the entire spectrum. So there's not kind of one that's better than another. It's sort of like working with people to help them kind of move towards the right hand side if that's if they want to, if stake is something that they see as important, and they really believe that that has the the potential to give more beneficial outcomes over the longer term. I think that these help to provide a draft example of how workers can start to incorporate both ownership and non ownership based returns into the way that they select opportunities and construct their work lives. And then I think it also, again, kinda shows that risk profile. So none of them, again, anchor to fully to the disruptive side of the spectrum. So I think as as different sorts of work solutions are proposed, this is a helpful sense check-in understanding, you know, what is the risk appetite of of young workers or workers in general at this particular moment. And then getting into governance models, this is really about understanding existing operating structures and models for optimizing for stake both as an employee and an independent worker. So I think something that is important to call out here is, despite a lot of speculation and opinion, there really wasn't clear evidence that being an independent worker or an employee was significantly more secure. Rather, the models are optimal based on context of of the individual. So employees can really find viable pathways to ownership through select employers, by opting into established employee ownership programs. Workers who also engage in collective bargaining for profit sharing or or who advocate in their workplaces for transparent accounting can really help, to understand their direct contribution to the bottom line and start to drive the cultures that result in ownership outcomes. And then for independent workers, these folks are best served by registering as a business and forming and deforming around specific projects and ends. So building trusted networks of value creators similar to the Hollywood model where, you know, for a particular film, each each agent has own their own legal ownership rights, and they also kind of come together for a particular project, with other folks that they trust, and have a relationship with to produce something valuable for everyone. And then also engaging in part time DAOs, which I'm sure a lot of folks on this call know stands for decentralized autonomous organizations, can support with profit sharing and moving towards specific missions without being overwhelmed by commitment, which some of the experts I interviewed really cited as a reason that a lot of DAOs deform. And also becoming highly skilled and specialized is kind of another big hedge against risk for for workers and long term viability in these sorts of structures. And then the last thing I think that's important for workers to understand is really how, how core what core technology types to begin to experiment with. And so this is sort of the enabling emerging technology stack. This research really identified in working with some web three developers, three key categories of compo of a composable technology stack that could power ownership models and value chains, built on top of, obviously, digital infrastructure like platform servers and databases. And so the three layers that kind of stack on top of that are the coordination layer, the financialization layer, and then the generative layer. And so when I talk about the coordination layer, those things are, you know, our governance components. So, you know, we can use smart contracts or governance tokens as emerging tools, but then there are also existing tools. So I think we can take inspiration from some of the things that are already working in places like the creator economy for how to construct these sorts of architectures. And then in the monetization layer, really the only tool presently that was seen as being secure enough to meet the the worker risk profile was the Ethereum Lightning Network. And then when we get into the creation layer, this is kind of where we're actually, like, building the front end of the of value, that's that's kind of facing either a user or other organizations of people. And so I think AI co pilots fit in here, but something that was kind of more of a web two, thing that was brought up was were things like Figma. So the things that, you can kind of like stack and start to play with together, to build these new models. And so as a next step, I think the because of the sample size, I'm looking to sort of start to validate some of this work with a larger sample size to ensure that they hold up at scale. I'm looking to start to run experiments using this kind of nascent playbook components, and work for stake elements in order to sort of start to learn and practice. I think, like I said earlier, this is sort of the broad contours and provocations around what we might move towards and how we might get there. But I think there's still a lot of learning to be done by getting a little more granular" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 90.0, "end": 90.0, "transcript": "with some" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 105.0, "end": 105.0, "transcript": "of these components. And then further research would really be around locating case studies and key examples starts to start to expand and deepen the playbook and help people to understand, again, what these things might look like in practice. So, yeah, that is my presentation, and I I know we wanna leave some time for q and a. So, yeah, I'll transition over to you, Nathan, to kinda moderate that discussion." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 120.0, "end": 120.0, "transcript": "Alright. Great. Thank you so much. You've given us a lot to work with, and we've already got the discussion going in chat. First, I wanted to just see if if Bee wanted to say a bit about this relationship about different kinds of ownership. You know, what what's the relationship in ownership between owning digital assets and ownership of firms? You know, we know, like, from our lawyer friends that ownership is a a a bundle of rights. It operates very differently in different context. The bundle is different, depending on things like technology, local context, what it is you're talking about owning. So I think this is a really good question to start us out with. Bee, do you wanna say a bit more about what you were thinking here?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 135.0, "end": 135.0, "transcript": "Thanks. Yeah. I mean, kinda no. I'm kinda I kinda like the the weird vagueness that it has right now to see what Amy's response is, but I I'd be happy to chime in with a follow-up question." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 150.0, "end": 150.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll respond as as I'm interpreting the question, and then I'm happy to kind of, like, get back to you to see if there's anything you wanna build on. So, yeah, I think some of the thing that that I found interesting as I think I got into it was, you know, I was wondering to myself, okay, you know, digital ownership, but what do you actually own? And that was kind of the the reason why I was like, I wanna dig into what the value chains actually are because I think there's this sense like, oh, we could own our data or, oh, we could we could own something else, but, like, what do I actually have, especially as we go into digital spaces? And so the way that I approached that was really by talking to, like, a number of experts in different spaces to say, okay. So there's certain folks who know a lot about being an employee and owning something. There's certain folks that know a lot about being online and owning something. Is it meaningfully different from kind of, like, where we are today to what a digitally native type of ownership would look like? And I think what I was kind of finding is, like, I think that the value chains are largely the same. Like, I think it's like there's royalties, residuals. There's the tokens on the stock. I think that the way that they show up and the way that we we you know, what the contracts might look like. So whether the contract's like a piece of paper that's validated by a lawyer or whether the contract is something that's validated through the blockchain. I think that the the pathways and protocols that we use to actually, like, have that ownership designation are changing and shifting. But I think the actual value chain of, like, at the end of the day, what am I holding in my hand and and and what is the vehicle of ownership were kind of similar. And so I think that was kind of an interesting realization was, like, tokens are really the only digitally native, component of the four. And so, you know, I I think when I thought about it, it's like there is a world where as trust in this type of thing increases as, you know, digitally native ownership becomes more widely adopted and acknowledged and and played with so that people have the precedence to kind of build that trust. There maybe is a world where tokens kind of become the dominant way that things are owned, but I think, like, right now, yeah, there is kind of those four key chains. I notably didn't include data because it seems like data ended up being a layer on top of one of those four when I was actually kind of, like, digging into it. So, yeah, that was kind of those are sort of my findings around, like, what you actually own and how it differs between, like, the the emerging kind of digital ownership space versus kind of where we sit today." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 3", "start": 165.0, "end": 165.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Thanks so much for that breakdown. That was really helpful. Yeah. Part of what motivated that way of thinking is, like, I'm not gonna lie. I've I I I've personally felt, like, really excited about co ops and, like, worker ownership and really not quite as excited about, like, various tokens and other digital assets that could like, very much could be a way that we express that value and express decision making processes. And I guess yeah. Like like, as you framed it, like, what do you actually hold? And maybe even more than that, like, what do you what can you withhold? Yeah. You know? What what what you know, not to be too summer of labor about it or whatever, but, like, there is there is this, like, really interesting thing around, like, what people how people can exercise those rights and what they Mhmm. Can pull out. So, yeah, I was I was really excited when I heard you were giving this presentation because I feel like there is still so much underexplored about how like, you you mentioned how there's a spectrum and a and kind of, like, a a menu of many options that people can have, and it was really helpful to hear from you too around kind of where different workers fell in terms of wanting some some of the kind of, like, more out there and experimental stuff and then also some of the more kind of, like, tried and true old fashioned stuff." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 180.0, "end": 180.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Totally. And I think that was kind of, like, this research is really about, like, what are the components. I think the scope was a bit broader than than I had anticipated at the beginning because I think I got into these things of, like, okay. Well yeah. Exactly. Like, what do you actually own? Like and I think once you know that, you can say, okay. Well, now I know what I'm looking for. Now I know what I can guide my decision towards, or now I know what I would have to trade or or those sorts of things. Like, I think there's a set of actions that become clearer once the the components that you're building with become clear. And so I think, yeah, again, like, it's really now starting to get into the actual experiments of, like, I think I see someone has, like, how do you transfer ownership and that sort of thing. So now that it's like, okay. Well, I know that these are the value chains. So then the next step is sort of, like, what would it look like to start to exchange those things or to start to make decisions around the jobs that you take or the ways that you structure a freelance career or something like that using those sore those four sort of value chains and then some of the technological components." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 195.0, "end": 195.0, "transcript": "Great. I'm gonna invite both Seth and Daniel had put themselves on stack at about the same time, so it makes me suspect that maybe there's something connected about their questions. And so I wonder if it would be okay if if Seth and Daniel could share what's on their minds and then, and then Amy could synthesize." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 210.0, "end": 210.0, "transcript": "Yeah. I'd" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 225.0, "end": 225.0, "transcript": "probably I would say probably no connection. I just got too late. Go for it, Daniel." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 5", "start": 240.0, "end": 240.0, "transcript": "Yeah. We'll see. I was wondering that too. I guess so I I kinda have two questions. Feel free to answer either or neither. So the first one is, you know, a lot of the things you're describing, you know, as you've said, have some precedent. You know, there's employee stock options. There's worker bonuses. So these things exist if you there's, you know, IRA contributions. So these things already exist. They tend to be clustered in, like, industries, knowledge base where workers have a lot of power. Would would normalizing that to all industries be aligned with your goals, or do you want something more fundamental? That's my first question. Like, would just that those practices spreading be sufficient, or do you want more than that? The second is what are your thoughts on, like, a liquidity of ownership? Like, should a worker have to could a worker take their ownership when they leave, or is there a value to having that ownership remain in the org and then having to perhaps sell it back or something like that? Those are my two thoughts." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 255.0, "end": 255.0, "transcript": "Mhmm. Yeah. So I guess I'll start I'll start with the first one around, like, the options that workers already have, like, when working for an employer. I will say, like, liquidity is something that I think is sort of, like, in the next step sort of bucket of things. Like, I I think that's, like, a very tactical question around, like, what happens once you have ownership. Whereas this is a little more more about exploring, like, what would it look like to optimize for ownership, and what are some experiments that you could run to start to get there. So I think when I think about, that piece about, you know, is employee ownership and and the sorts of components that make that up enough. I think, you know, work for stake was something that I framed up as, like, you know, I think it'd be really ideal if, like, workers had, you know, had agency and had the ability to, like, own the value that they produce in some capacity. But, you know, obviously, like, what does that actually look like? And I think in discovering in working with actual participants and and them kind of saying, like, you know, I'm not willing to take a risk, but, you know, there's still options that exist for those people to start to have some sense of what it's like to own something and then maybe feel more comfortable with playing in the ownership space and start to take more risky forms of ownership. I think the idea is, like, the idea would be moving towards more kind of, like, independent forms of ownership that aren't fully dependent on just the employer relationship. But I think it's an acknowledgment of the fact that that's not the comfort level for a lot of folks, especially with a lot of the economic constraints that people are dealing with. And so it's kind of better to start to exercise the options that you do have, you know, for potentially within a present job or in the types of of employee employer relations that you choose to pursue. And I think, like, even findings, like, you know, most people that have access to ownership options aren't exercising them. I think it's starting to build a literacy around what you're you're missing out on if you're not optimizing for ownership that you have access to and starting to build a film mail familiarity with like, oh, I'm actually starting to play with these things and put some energy into those sorts of things even if it's in an employer employee model and start to see some of the, like, benefits of doing so. And then, hopefully, that kind of literacy would propel someone to start to say, oh, well, maybe this is something that's more possible, and then I can kind of pursue other avenues towards rather than just staying there. But I think yeah. Again, just to just to kind of wrap it all together, it really is, like, thinking of it as a continuum and that, you know, I might see it as an ideal to move towards the more independent forms of ownership, but some folks may feel like it's totally fine to stay at one place and that doesn't preclude them from starting to with what ownership looks like in those different avenues. And there is actually a need for that because, people either don't know that it exists, aren't choosing jobs for those reasons, and aren't act like, actually using those options when they are available." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 270.0, "end": 270.0, "transcript": "Cool. Thanks, Daniel. That. And then Celine." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 285.0, "end": 285.0, "transcript": "Amy, thanks so much. I really appreciate the very comprehensive case for for worker ownership kind of from from your perspective. Also, yeah, really love all the all the little hints of of your systems thinking training kinda working in there. There's a little gap in in the argument you built that I'd love to hear you flush out. It it's a very understandable gap because, you know, we're all very tech inclined people, but I didn't hear you say why technology. I mean, the problems you identified, you know, I I I don't wanna oversimplify your case. It's a little bit like you're putting on workers. Well, if workers just, like, had thought of this, or if they have the values for it, then, like, this would be happening. And so that's that's our leverage point. That's not kinda how you motivated your your your studies. And it makes sense, I think, to focus on workers if we're interested in empowerment. Don't focus on funders. Don't focus on activists. Focus on workers because the whole point of empowering workers is to empower workers. But if that, you know, is your analysis, then, like, the diagnostics seems like, okay. Education, workshopping, like, resources. I I I didn't follow the the leap kind of from there to, like, we need new technologies that we need. Co ops have been out there for a long time. They, you know, already have their upsides and downsides kinda well understood. And if precarity is a major problem for ownership, technology seems as maybe like a liability. Right? Because anything that hasn't been mainstream for a decade and a half, I would guess, increases precarity because it's not proven, you know, because we haven't seen its effects ripple through an economy. So can you walk that was a little bit of an essay. Yeah. Could you walk me through?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 300.0, "end": 300.0, "transcript": "No. No, Seth. I, like, I appreciate that. I think having the opportunity to sort of, like, stress test these sorts of things is always helpful, so I appreciate that. I think so I'll start from kind of the beginning of framing it up. So I think there are a lot of top down solutions that could probably provide the most impactful forms of intervention for this type of problem. The the challenge that I was seeing is like, okay. These top down solutions to these systemic problems tend to be slow. They tend to be out of the hands of workers like, you know, more it's more like governments or large scale employers that can make those shifts. And those shifts tend to move tend to move at a slower speed than than workers who are facing a lot of very imminent challenges can really afford. And so that was kind of one of the starting places of thinking. Okay. So at scale, what can make an impact at scale? Well, it would be these top down interventions. Okay. Well, top down interventions aren't happening at the speed and and that meet worker needs. So what can workers do from a bottom up perspective that could have impact at scale? And so that bottom up experimentation with new technologies is kind of that layer that adds a potential scale. So the ability to do more, at scale with less is sort of the impetus for using these, emerging tools and technologies. And so that is kind of to the point that you made around we need new tech. And then the the question around precarity, it's like, you know, I I I would love to say that there are guarantees, but I think, like, there's less of a guarantee in standard employment models than there ever has been. And I think that there's a a greater opportunity than ever given the increasing, like, power and access to new technologies. And so rather than saying, like, this is 100% the solution. I know this is the answer. This work is really saying, like, hey. Let's take this bottom up approach and, like, what we have to work with, and let's start to see what experimentation could, be done. And so really this, like, the idea of the playbook and the vision of the future that I'm building are really to say, like, here's some starter solutions. Here's a provocation for what the future could look like that could maybe feel a little more empowering and exciting and, like, possible to take bottom up action toward. And then let's take that, and then as a next step, start to actually play in these spaces. So to start to derisk some of this stuff now that I understand kind of what people's actual risk appetite is starting to look like across that sort of portfolio spectrum. So I think this is kind of an intermediary step. So it's like kind of discovering that I wanted to do bottom up, that technology is the scale component, that there's a derisking that needs to happen, starting to talk with workers and understand, is this sense right? Is this exciting? What are the components of experimentation? And then that kind of future step would be, like, actually starting to conduct these experiments and starting to do some of the precarity mitigation that you were also kinda speaking about." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 315.0, "end": 315.0, "transcript": "That was super comprehensive, and I feel like the the the gaps I was experiencing in, like, in your arc are filled. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 330.0, "end": 330.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And I think that's helpful in terms of, like, telling the story in the future. So I really appreciate that, Seth. Thank you." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 345.0, "end": 345.0, "transcript": "Thank you. I'll we we have time for just one more question, I think. I'm sorry not to be able to ring everybody in, but we've just got a lot of good discussion happening here. Selena, do you wanna go ahead?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 360.0, "end": 360.0, "transcript": "Yeah. We'd love to. Thanks a lot for the presentation, first of all. I hope you can hear me well hear me well. During my research regarding cooperatives and their structures and ownership and governance models, what I saw was that the biggest resistance to found an employee on structure was actually sticking to the model in the later stages. So they were starting as a 100% employee owned structure, and later on, they were becoming to a more of a mixed structure where they were renting employees on a contractual basis. And even so, there there was usually or occasionally coming to a point that they were losing the employee owned structure as a whole and becoming a regular investor owned company. So what were your findings in terms of this transition to the later stages as well, like, growing as an organization and becoming bigger?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 375.0, "end": 375.0, "transcript": "Yeah. To be honest, like, I that wasn't some sorry. Go ahead, Nathan." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 390.0, "end": 390.0, "transcript": "I'm so sorry. I just realized we had another person before Celine, Drew. I wonder if Drew could share his thoughts, and then you could answer." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 405.0, "end": 405.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Okay. So That's okay. Just sorry. Go ahead." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 420.0, "end": 420.0, "transcript": "No. Yeah. Do enter this first. I hope that that's alright." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 435.0, "end": 435.0, "transcript": "No. I I was just gonna make sure I understood Celine's question. So it's really just about, like, how do these companies, like, manage retaining an ownership based model as they kind of, like, grow and scale? Or" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 450.0, "end": 450.0, "transcript": "Exactly. As more employees join and leave as well. So there are, like, two differentiating factors, I would say." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 465.0, "end": 465.0, "transcript": "Okay. Cool. Sorry. Go ahead, Drew. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 480.0, "end": 480.0, "transcript": "Thank you very much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 495.0, "end": 495.0, "transcript": "No. That that that's okay. I can I can ask after if we have a minute, but no no worries?" }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 510.0, "end": 510.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Okay. I'll quickly try and answer that. I think I think the the short answer to your question, Celen, is, like, I am aware that kind of that that retention and, like, transfer of, like, people within a community and the growing pains of an organization are, like, definitely factors to consider in the, to consider in the, like, feasibility of retaining an ownership model. I think this is really kinda that that's sort of, like, at the maturity end of things. This is sort of a a very immature level of, like, at the individual scale, are we actually optimizing for ownership? Are there things that we could be doing that are more in our best interest from, like, a, you know, a generative labor kind of perspective? So I think these things are kind of along the same spectrum. I'm really at that nascent phase, and I think you, from what I'm understanding, are exploring something where it's a little bit more mature. And so I think my hope would be to take case studies like the research that you're doing to understand kind of like, okay. Here's that transition for the individual. Now if you were actually to implement some of these things and try and grow and scale, here are some case studies you might refer to in order to understand sort of like the, best practices or challenges in doing so and and how you might sort of structure some of that into the way that you're thinking about at the front end to avoid any of the, you know, the pitfalls or or that sort of thing that that are already commonly known." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 525.0, "end": 525.0, "transcript": "Yeah. Understand. That's already very clear. Thank you very much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 540.0, "end": 540.0, "transcript": "Cool. Thanks so much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 555.0, "end": 555.0, "transcript": "Alright. Well, I we are just about at the hour, so I don't wanna push this over to respect everybody's time. We have a follow-up discussion set up in the Slack. Thank you, Cent, for that. So please just continue the conversation in in online space. Amy, clearly, you've provoked a lot of really good thinking and questions and conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. We hope you'll continue the conversation with us in in in other medical spaces starting with the our Slack space. But first of all, before everyone leaves, I wanna invite everyone to take a moment on the count of three to unmute and share your appreciation for this extraordinary talk. Three, two, one, go." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 570.0, "end": 570.0, "transcript": "Thanks so much, everyone, and thanks, Amy." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 5", "start": 585.0, "end": 585.0, "transcript": "Fantastic work. Thanks, Amy." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 4", "start": 600.0, "end": 600.0, "transcript": "Keep going." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 6", "start": 615.0, "end": 615.0, "transcript": "Thank you very much." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 1", "start": 630.0, "end": 630.0, "transcript": "Thank you. Cool." }, { "speaker": "Speaker 2", "start": 645.0, "end": 645.0, "transcript": "Have a great weekend." } ], "summary": null } }