#WeekendReads: Highlights from #CommunityWealth Generation Beyond the V/Alley #socent #impinv #sharingeconomy #law #msulawsm

Source: http://www.onthecommons.org

Every Monday the paper.li that I curate updates and as my schedule permits I chip away at reviewing the articles during the week. Below are some of the articles that stand out as significant conversations about social enterprise, impact investing, the sharing economy and the law.

• Improving options for investing and small business access to capital
• Impact investing panel talks crowdfunding, Triangle Business Journal. As we (im)patiently wait for the SEC to promulgate the final rules for equity crowdfunding authorized by the JOBS Act, more and more states are authorizing equity crowdfunding for small businesses within their states, even resurrecting the pre-Securities Act tradition of local stock markets. While this Triangle Business Journal article does not dig deeply into the logic of impact investing and crowdfunding, I find it notable because it highlights the geographic breadth of the interest in this approach to small business funding. Impact investing is not just a left coast liberal "thing." It's about helping businesses do well in their communities and allowing their non-accredited neighbors and customers (people whose net worth is too low for traditional direct equity investment) invest in the businesses they value and support.
• Deep in the Business section of the paper.li, Cutting Edge Capital's "Is a Direct Public Offering Right For Me?" reads like a good substantive introduction to one tool for impact investing, the direct public offering. 

• Worker Cooperatives and the commons - three good reads and a video
• Own the Change: Building Economic Democracy One Worker Co-Op at a Time (video). This video not only profiles worker-owners who have successfully built worker-owned cooperatives, it also breaks down the process of developing a cooperative into discrete steps. Granted, at 22 minutes, it's not as substantive as a session with a lawyer who has cooperative formation expertise BUT it is a VERY good start for organizations contemplating this structure to review the video and start thinking through the governance structure that makes sense for the talents and goals of the members, the products they will produce and the consumer market they will serve.
  
• New York City Invests in Worker Co-ops — and Equitable Growth. I generally prefer to highlight efforts elsewhere, but in light of the high costs for living and for business in New York City, I am inspired by the city's decision to invest "$1.2 million this year in developing worker-owned businesses in low-income communities and communities of color. It's the largest investment in such businesses ever made by a city government in the United States."
  
• Apparently Mondragon Cooperative, based in Spain, has a tumblr. I don't really get tumblr, but the more I learn about Mondragon, the more I believe that their model merits very close scrutiny and broad implementation.
  
• The New Greek Government Endorses Commons-Based, Peer Production Solutions. Greece and Syriza's efforts to retool the Greek economy into a commons-based, bottom-up, peer-production model with transparent national governance should be interesting to track. The focus on implementing these efforts first in education and small business development, rather than rushing to nationalize everything may well place Greece on better footing to make a more effective transition. And the focus on transparent governance should help mitigate corruption.

• Efforts to improve the data analysis for the "social good"
• Calculating the Social Cost of Policymaking - Maryland's former governor and potential presidential hopeful, Martin O'Malley, oversaw a cost effectiveness analysis of state fleet vehicles and included net present value plus (NPV+), "a new way to include social and environmental impacts into the overall cost of something. The concept is an expansion of the more common NPV analysis that calculates the lifetime value of a purchase in present terms by incorporating upfront costs with potential savings and expenses down the road, all while accounting for inflation. The "plus" adds tangential factors like the cost of environmental degradation and benefits like ecological resiliency."
• Also see Can You Set A Standard for Social Impact?
  
• Green energy and energy cooperatives
• How and Why Utilities Make Solar Look Expensive. This is an interesting critique of Tucson Electric Power's apparent effort to dismiss solar power investment despite Tucson's abundance of solar energy. It's a bit snarky and the author takes the utility to task for "exaggerating [solar power's] cost" by inflating the cost by 45%. If, despite the snark, the analysis is accurate, then this is something Tucson residents (like my mom) need to challenge.
  
• Community-Owned Energy: How Nebraska Became the Only State to Bring Everyone Power From a Public Grid. "In the United States, there is one state, and only one state, where every single resident and business receives electricity from a community-owned institution rather than a for-profit corporation. ... In Nebraska, 121 publicly owned utilities, ten cooperatives, and 30 public power districts provide electricity to a population of around 1.8 million people." Though the bulk of the energy is generated from coal and nuclear, the community has voted to increase investment in renewables (especially wind turbines) fairly consistently since 2003. Way to go Huskers!
  
• With Lent now in full swing, I was also pleased to see that Shareable.net shared "What Catholic Social Teaching Can Teach the Sharing Economy". As Catholics go, I'm more Dorothy Day than Opus Dei, and a large part of my faith and spiritual practice has to do with the developed tradition of Catholic social teaching: preferential option for the poor; subsidiarity; solidarity; the commons; and family values (which is not as easily partisan as too many people on the left and right like to believe). It's also worth noting the recent Guardian Lifestyle piece, It's Nice to Be Nice, as a welcome reminder and companion piece to Catholic Social Teaching.

Week in Review: #CommunityWealth Generation & #Socent News Beyond the V/Alley via @OuiShare @nytdavidbrooks @DemocracyCollab

Reviewing the articles collected in this week's edition of Beyond the V/Alley paper.li, I have decided 1) that my future practice must include significant attention to administrative law, and 2) I still want to dual qualify as a solicitor in the UK because I am impressed by many organizations in the community wealth development and impact investing circles.

The articles and video that stood out to me in this edition of Beyond the V/Alley, include:

• Michael Shuman's GritTV interview on "Moving Your Money" followed by a short profile of the Cero cooperative in Boston, MA:

• David Brooks' editorial, "How to Leave a Mark" not only appears in this edition, it was also was frequently shared on Facebook and Twitter, and for good reason. He distinguishes socially responsible investing (largely a strategy of avoiding the bad) from impact investing (a strategy of building the good through targeted community investments). It's a good, balanced and succinct read.

• The Stanford Social Innovation Review article, "US Economic Mobility and Investing for Impact" links to the recent Aspen Institute & Georgetown University report, The Bottom Line: Investing for Impact on Economic Mobility in the US. This is a pretty substantive report "with a focus on deal flow and returns. [They] did not set out to complete a comprehensive state of the field survey, but instead to understand how the investments of active investors could help build economic security for families." The report zeroes in on impact investing for outcomes in education, community economic assets (e.g. reducing the costs of recidivism and affordable housing), and health and well-being. As a law student, I find it curious that "law" is rarely expressly referenced in the full report (except with respect to tax laws), though federal, state and local "policy" is ubiquitous and appears to function as a euphemism for administrative law (See pp 127-128 of the report, which is a chart of the most important federal statutes related to community-based impact investing). At any rate, I look forward to reading the full report...soonish (ahhh, law school...so greedy with my time).

• The business headlines this week are a bit ... odd, but Assets & Opportunity Scorecard (via the Democracy Collaborative) is an interesting resource for "for data on household financial security and policy solutions." From the About page: "The Assets & Opportunity Scorecard is a comprehensive look at Americans’ financial security today and their opportunities to create a more prosperous future. It assesses the 50 states and the District of Columbia on 135 outcome and policy measures, which describe how well residents are faring and what states can do to help them build and protect assets."

• Anyone who is interested in the nexus between local impact investing, community development, and transparency in governance needs to follow the progress of the new Office of Community Wealth Building in Richmond, VA. It was established last year to coordinate poverty reduction and wealth building initiatives. Richmond, VA and Jackson, MS are piloting potentially transformative and scalable models of prudent public-private partnerships and other community-based initiatives. They are definitely communities to watch.

• There are two very awesome conferences soliciting proposals, and I am very put out that I cannot attend either of them. 
• A call for proposals for the 2nd Annual #FLOSS4P2P conference in London is accepting proposals through February 28th. So, if you have a project that is "building software for peer production and organization, with a focus on distributed ones," then you might want to get your proposal in soon. It sounds like a very interesting conference particularly if the projects leverage P2P technology to support effective and efficient cooperative enterprise. Plus it's in London, and as I plan to dual qualify as a solicitor in the not too distant future, my inner Anglophile really wants to attend.

• The third OuiShare Fest in Paris will explore the theme "Lost in Transition" during "a three-day festival about the collaborative society" from May 20-22, 2015, and it seeks proposals for sessions and content that will further discussions and actions in collaborative social development (e.g. "collaborative consumption, open source, makers and fablabs, coworking, crowdfunding, alternative currencies and horizontal governance." It sounds a lot like the Peers.org SHARE conference I was invited to attend last May, but OuiShare appears more focused on collaborative society and not as focused on the collaborative workforce as Peers seems to be. Sadly, I won't be able to confirm this in person this year, but perhaps you will. If you make it to OuiShare, having learned about it from me, please note: I really love Cybèle, an eau de toilette by Galimard. In case you were wondering. 

#CommunityWealth Generation and #Socent News Beyond the V/Alley Highlights

While the Silicon Valley in California and the Silicon Alley in NYC are well regarded as hot spots for innovation, including in social enterprise, I have begun tracking developments in social enterprise and community wealth generation beyond those two focal communities. To that end, I created a paper.li, Beyond the V/Alley.

While there are many notable articles and videos in this week's edition, I'd like to particularly draw attention to:

• Goldman Sachs' Schematic of Social Impact Bonds

I do not generally think of "Goldman Sachs" and "positive social impact" as complimentary realities. However, the summary process map of how their social impact bonds function in public/private partnerships strikes me as particularly useful. Too often would-be high impact social programs can be sidelined by program mismanagement and/or mission creep. This process map succinctly lays out the importance of division of labor (e.g. the project manager, service provider, and evaluator are different entities) can help a project proceed smoothly and insure that the vital outcomes for the key community, institutional and investor stakeholders are met.

Granted, I think care should be taken to insure that the investors have not been complicit in creating the social ills that the bonds seek to redress (e.g. banks that shamelessly red-lined neighborhoods should not then be able to structure social impact bonds for blight-busting in such a way as to maximize their payouts). But that is a conversation for a much bigger process map.

• Building Sustainable Communities: Initial Research Results

Written by LISC (Local Initiatives Support Corporation) Director of Research Chris Walker, this report highlights early-stage results from LISC’s Building Sustainable Communities initiative. The report demonstrates how a comprehensive community development approach that targets investments in affordable housing, economic development, edu­cation, health, and safety can significantly raise incomes and decrease unemployment in low-income neighborhoods. Also included are case studies in Providence, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, and Chicago.

• Maine's Largest Worker Co-Op Running in Stonington

This is a short news article and video profiling the successful transition of a local market into a worker cooperative. It does not discuss legal strategy (for that, a good start would be the SELC's Think Outside the Boss handbook - bearing in mind the need to adapt the information for your actual jurisdiction).

• How a Startup DC Purchasing Co-Op Saved Members $1M 

This Shareable.net profile of the Community Purchase Alliance is one of my favorite stories out of last week. It speaks to the power of leveraging the purchasing power of anchor institutions to not just save money but to also invest in just and sustainable businesses that prioritize the three Ps: people, planet & profit.

• SELC and Shareable Kick Off a Campaign to Save Seed Sharing in the US

I am a gardener in withdrawal, and as I carefully pour over my Baker Heirloom Seed Catalog, I have looked forward to the day when I could help keep heirloom seed varieties alive through seed sharing with seed libraries. Unfortunately, that activity has irritated some state legislators. This campaign aims to keep seed sharing legal. 

There MANY other articles and videos on the paper.li that are worth exploring. These are just a handful that struck me as particularly timely. Take a look and comment below on what you think I should have highlighted instead.

Crowdsourcing #A2J: Some thoughts on @CrowdDefend & the strategic use of #collcons & the #sharingeconomy

Yesterday, I learned about the launch of CrowdDefend, a new platform combining crowdfunding and impact legislation. This appears to be a desperately needed tool for leveling the playing field, first for socially important litigation and second (perhaps) for private lawsuits in which a monied party uses or threatens to use litigation strategies to bully the other party into submission (by either dropping the case or settling). It is an important companion piece to low-bono, pro-bono, and law school legal clinic solutions.

And it also illustrates the expanding application of the ethics of care at the heart of the outcomes-oriented sharing economy, which strives to use transactions as a means of developing a more equitable, just, sustainable and resilient society. With CrowdDefend, that ethic can be taken to another systemic level, improving social justice outcomes in our case law.

Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an overstatement for a two-day old startup, because CrowdDefend is currently an invite-only crowdfunding platform. BUT it is a perfectly reasonable statement if one takes the long view and CrowdDefend figures out how to last.

Nevertheless, as a legal eaglet and Reinvent Law devotee, I have some concerns, chiefly: what if the campaign owners (the folks who launch a case crowdfunding campaign) are the attorneys of record on the case? Some of my anxiety below is admittedly the pre-emptive nail-biting of a newbie; hopefully, as CrowdDefend evolves and grows, some (if not all) of my concerns will be rendered moot.

• Privilege, Confidentiality and Trial Publicity. Any lawyer who ends up using CrowdDefend as a campaign owner will need to pay extra attention to the attorney/client privilege and confidentiality requirements in Model Rule 1.6 (c): "A lawyer shall make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to, information relating to the representation of a client."

• Attorney commentary about the profession. Imprudent discussion of the counsel or judges involved in a case could also land the attorney in hot water, per Model Rule 8.2 (and maybe 3.5 a wee bit).

• Justice or Advertising? While CrowdDefend is focused on the justice needs of clients, I wonder if it might not run the risk of becoming a form of attorney advertising deemed "undignified" by some jurisdictions. There are bound to be some attorneys who will reference their use of CrowdDefend in advertising material about their professional services and the strategies they will pursue to help their clients. The problem may arise (and perhaps should arise) when the attorney has more skill for launching a campaign than for raising funds for his clients' case. And if the attorney is the campaign owner, rather than the client, then the ethics can become especially hairy if the attorney offers levels of "perks" as authorized in the CrowdDefend Terms of Use. Provided the perks don't amount to coupons or gift certificates for the attorney's professional services, then they shouldn't be considered "advertising" under the current Model Rule 7.2, but using CrowdDefend would, nevertheless increase the attorney's professional visibility.

• Fee-Sharing. CrowdDefend charges campaign owners a flat 7% fee on funds generated through the campaigns.  Model Rule 5.4 always surfaces in discussions around law firm capitalization and ownership, and here it has bearing on the actual cases. Does that fee constitute a kind of fee-sharing arrangement since the total amount paid would vary based on the amount of money raised (with the balance going towards covering the attorney's litigation costs)? Or would that 7%fee be considered an incidental expense for the matter?

Presumably the lawyer(s) would have their clients' informed consent prior to using CrowdDefend for their case. But one of the "perks" of donating to a CrowdDefend case, according to CrowdDefend's marketing, is that the donor will receive updates about the crowdfunding campaign and the case.

Certainly, it is possible to provide updates that are largely procedural rather than substantive because attorneys do that all the time, in compliance with Model Rule 3.6. But imprudent management of case information online could have such significant consequences (including the loss of privilege protection) due to the reach of the internet and information caching online.

If ever there were an innovation that lays bear the logic and timeliness of Lucy Jewell's call to develop a participatory legal culture around professional ethics, CrowdDefend is it. Donors and interested parties may well want more insight into the human story of the legal professionals and not just the case parties, but as things stand now in most jurisdictions, if an attorney's analysis of the other counsel or the judiciary is found to denigrate the profession in some way, that attorney risks some degree of professional sanction.

Well, my hands are good and wrung. But I am still convinced that CrowdDefend is a welcome, necessary and potentially transformative resource for access to justice. Despite my totally premature concerns, I look forward to hearing more about how CrowdDefend grows, evolves and improves social justice outcomes in our legal system and our case law.

The Person I Want To Be & The Work I Want To Do #sharingeconomy #SHARE2014 #reinventlaw

I was raised as an only child, which means neither listening nor sharing come naturally to me.

But the life journey I've been on has taught me how to be better at both. And raising a wonderful, strong-willed and shockingly intuitive four year old challenges me to continue to grow in my listening and sharing skills. Professionally, I look forward to developing my new career path (from academic administration and university teaching to law and legal entrepreneurship), with a commitment to hone my listening ear and heart, and develop a deeper understanding of sharing. Doing so will make me a more effective advisor and advocate for the resilient communities with which I hope to work.

Yet, the prospect of foregrounding that commitment is by no means an obvious one because I am in law school and law too often emphasizes centralized authority that regulates the bejeezus out of the innovative zeitgeist at the heart of the sharing economy.

This tension between law and innovation figured prominently in panel discussions and informal conversations I had at the SHARE conference in San Francisco in May. The topics that captured my attention the most were: grassroots legislation reform; homesharing law wins (here and here) and setbacks; the trifecta between regulation, entrenched market interests (especially with ridesharing), and sharing; the tension between dead capital and venture capital in sharing economy platforms; and questions of access, equity and inclusion. There were some people who felt strongly that if the laws didn't work, then simply skirting the law was a valid response. But overwhelmingly there was more of a willingness to work with regulators as co-creators of the sharing economy, which I found to be a more reasonable position.

Regulators are people too. Work with them as if they are part of the #SharingEconomy. How will you build trust with them? #2014SHARE
— Karen FrancisMcWhite (@accidentalhippy) May 14, 2014

But attending SHARE did not only afford me the opportunity (thanks to generous support from Peers.org and SOCAP) to listen to the incredible speakers and others in more informal gatherings, it also presented me with an opportunity to spend several hours with my professional role model, Janelle Orsi, founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Admittedly, I was a little worried that I may have rubbed her the wrong way even before we met. I had contacted her several months before about the prospect of coming to Michigan to run a Legal Tools for the Sharing Economy workshop for the student organization I co-founded, the Resilient Communities Law Society. Mind you, it's not like my follow-ups had been like that paperboy in "Better Off Dead" (well, maybe a little bit). But Ms. Orsi took my enthusiasm in stride, was personable and allowed me to observe intakes at one of the SELC's Legal Cafes.

Essentially SHARE 2014 and connecting with Janelle Orsi reaffirmed my commitment to growing a new career as a legal advocate for the sharing economy and community resilience. I came to law school convinced that I would focus on community-based urban redevelopment and urban agriculture, and rather than pivot after two years of law school, I think I've widened the aperture a bit.

That widening is largely thanks to the incredible learning and professional development experiences I have had through the MSU ReInvent Law Laboratory. ReInvent Law has introduced me to pioneers in legal design, services and reform, and given me opportunities to develop the project I came to law school to build: MiHomestead.com. I unveiled the first iteration at ReInvent Law London last summer and continued to work on it through a subsequent presentation at ReInvent Law NYC, and for a pitch competition.

So when ReInvent Law London 2014 took place last week, I followed the Twitter feed for #reinventlaw as closely as the four-legged menagerie I am pet-sitting allowed. Last year, I had been so nervous in preparation for my talk that I did not adequately do one very important thing: listen to the other talks. This year, I "listened" to the feed and heartily wished I could be at the conference. Hopefully the videos of the talks will be uploaded soon, especially the following:

• Kanan Dhru, Research Foundation for Governance in India, Lawtoons: Law Made Fun through Comics
• Ivan Rasic, LegalTrek, Lean: Can NewLaw Learn from Tech Startups?
• Mårten Janson, Fondia, Legal Departments as a Service
• Siobhan Duncan, Westminster University Law, Affordable Justice - Prepaid Cards & the Legal Services
• Frédéric Pelouze & Alexandra Uhel, Alter Litigation, The Paris Bar Incubator: Towards Innovation in the Legal Market
• Carlo Rossi Chauvenet, legalPAD/We Have the Future, Law is Not Enough

To say that I have found myself in a bit of a quandary as I consider my professional life after I graduate in May would be an understatement.

I continue to work on MiHomestead, but I am well aware of startup statistics (even as I adopt a Lean approach) and am stepping up my research of other avenues for combining my interests in law, the sharing economy, food system reform and community resilience.

Of course I am also aware that the year I finish law school is the year my daughter starts kindergarten, so whatever I do professionally and wherever that journey takes us must be a good parenting decision for my Washington-born, outdoorsy-and-artsy, and London-loving little girl (Sidebar: she has an airplane roller bag that she keeps by the door because "I might need it to fly somewhere" says the child who at four has already been on over two dozen airplanes).

So as I pet/housesit this summer and work on MiHomestead, I have a lot to review, think about, and DO. Because the person I want to be doesn't just sit on her laurels and listen, she's a doer and a sharer vested in building the more resilient society in which I want my child and all children to grow and thrive. She's also a bit of a law geek inspired by legal innovation and determined to roll up her sleeves and join in the grief and the joys of making the law work for resilient communities, rather than against them.