Season 1: Episode 11

If you felt panic when you read the recent OuiShare article, “The Collaborative Economy is Over,” Francesca is here to put your mind at ease. Rather than ending, the collaborative economy has entered a new phase in the evolution of innovation: what has actually ended is not the collaborative economy itself, but the need to differentiate between it and the “normal” economy. As we scale, use and incorporate new ideas and technologies, we develop the need for different language, tools, policies, and capabilities to interact with those things.

Francesca weighed in on the challenge of creating the structure and scaffolding that allow OuiShare to move with fluidity and remain a distributed, decentralized, autonomous, spontaneous organization. Working with an intuitive management style, Francesca expounds on the value of listening and experimenting, of trying new things, and of finding the right balance. Only when you talk to the people both in the core and on the edge can you understand what is important to them and where the tensions are. What makes OuiShare a unique organism is its thick social fabric, where members have the feeling of belonging to something coherent but also the liberty to launch and execute a project. When they are not restrained by a bloated collective decision making process, projects within OuiShare’s social structure are naturally self governing.

Now in its fourth year, OuiShare Fest has expanded beyond Paris to Barcelona and Rio de Janeiro. What has remained consistent across all locations is the ability for people to self appoint and create something on brand for OuiShare’s values while still taking on local flavor and engaging a whole new community. Join me as one of my favorite instigators shares her “secret sauce” for OuiShare Fest’s ongoing success, and her experiments with its open source future. Don’t forget to mark your calendar: described as “TED meets Burning Man,” OuiShare Fest 2016 takes place in Paris from May 18th – 21st.

Social Links:

• https://twitter.com/francescapick
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescapick/en
• https://www.facebook.com/francesca.pick