Loconomy
About
Loconomy is a research and development project of the Rizoma Foundation. It is a technology platform that will allow for the easy selling of local, sustainable, and just products and services to customers looking to buy in accordance with their values.
Loconomy seeks to:
- localize supply chains
- build community
- create jobs
- promote sustainable solutions.
The goal of Loconomy is to build a localized, decentralized network between producers and consumers that promotes human-to-human connection and helps us to usher in an era of sustainability and resilient local communities.
The platform introduces four components that, put together, make it unique:
A streamlined eCommerce platform that makes selling and buying as easy as possible. This will include the option to ‘sell’ for free or barter.
A focus on local self-determination and self-reliance, including self-determined distribution, in-person community building supported by on-platform groups and fora to share relevant information for the local community.
Loconomy will be structured to include local ambassadors whose role will be to understand how individuals are using the platform and co-creating a useful tool with local input and ownership.
The community of buyers on this platform will value handmade over machine made, natural over industrial, quality over mass production, reused over newly-made and local above all. Anyone can sell on the app, but producers will be incentivized by a higher ratings to make quality, sustainable, ethical products and services.
We believe Loconomy can create the local commerce infrastructure to allow for certain goods and services to be provided entirely locally, either through local production or resale.
Local economies
Because of our heavy reliance on global supply chains, it is often hard for us to consider what's possible in terms of relying on local economies. We suggest the following categories of goods and services can and should be produced within bioregional limits.
Goods
Some categories of goods include: food; apparel and accessories; shoes; beauty and skincare; children and baby; toys and games; tools and hardware; wine, beer and spirits; furniture; raw materials; home décor; stationary and printing; music; sports and activities; health, wellness, and self-care; books; plants and flowers; art; antiques; pet supplies; automotive, appliances or electronic parts.
Services
Some categories of local services could include: auto, appliance, tech repair; farm and garden labor; classes and workshops; art and creative; beauty and hair care; local transport; skilled labor; child and pet care; food, beverage and hospitality; house care and other collaborations.
The vision
Localize supply chains
Loconomy seeks to not only accelerate the connection between local producers and consumers, it seeks to make buying and selling local, sustainable products as easy as possible, by providing a streamlined ecommerce platform. This will attract buyers and sellers who do not want the hassle of direct sales, which currently involves multiple steps to locate one another and myriad different platforms for completing sales. The goal is to capture not only the market currently using buy local social media groups, but to make buying this way so easy that more people choose to purchase this way. The goal is to fortify localized goods and services in advance of another crisis that will challenge the structure of globalized markets.
Build community
The proposed platform seeks to make ethical consumption easy through crowdsourced vetting, but it also has the explicit goal of building actual communities through sustainable consumption. The goal is for consumers and producers to co-create, through the marketplace, all the goods and services a community would need locally. The goal of the platform is to help potential producers see the marketplace for their goods or services in their local area, making entry into sustainable business easier. The goal is to connect real people who can work together to solve real problems the arise from re-making local economies: from sharing seeds to backyard chicken tips to where to source regeneratively produced leather or where to find natural dyes for art. This technology is simply a tool to develop decentralized resilient communities who both produce and consume ethically and support each other through ongoing relationships in the process.
Create jobs
The goal of this technology is to lower the barrier to entry for those looking for a new economic livelihood in the face of economic contraction and austerity. The platform will make it possible to assess the marketplace and experiment with different ways of making a living in the local economy. With this platform, it will be easy to see what kind of income you can generate from your garden or workshop or services you can provide. The platform incentives sustainable production, so it will make pursuing high-quality practices lucrative. From new, small-scale home producers to local Loconomy ambassadors, to those offering local transport of goods, we envision an entire new economic ecosystem that pays living wages and produces quality material goods necessary for local resilience.
Promote sustainble solutions
The solutions to our ecological crisis are myriad, diverse, and sometimes locally-specific. We have many options to explore and develop.
This can include anything from cooperative housing to bike lanes to community repair events to preventing wasted food to gleaning to worker-owned cooperative businesses. The challenge is not a lack of ideas for ushering in a sustainable future, the challenge is a lack of social and political infrastructure to enact change.
Research suggests that as community members connect to solve an identified problem, other ideas and innovations inevitably arise. For example, as people seek to troubleshoot backyard chickens, they inevitably begin talking about other initiatives with community members such as cooperative housing, seed sharing, tool libraries, bartering and more. This platform seeks to foment such cross-pollination by utilizing individuals’ desire to consume ethically to connect them with others who can then collectively develop the social and political capital to tackle structural initiatives.
The goal of Loconomy is to build a localized, decentralized network between producers and consumers that promotes human-to-human connection and helps us to usher in an era of sustainability and resilient local communities.
We will achieve this goal by creating an ownership structure that does not exploit, but instead offers a vast, decentralized option for co-ownership and co-governance with local communities.
Loconomy Advisory Board
Ashley Colby, PhD
Ashley is an Environmental Sociologist, and (now) homesteader, writer, traveler, and serial podcast guest. In her book she wrote about subsistence food producers in Chicago. Before her current life she was once an itinerant overland international traveler, Chicago Tribune travel writer, and a long-haul, 18-wheel-driving trucker. Ashley is now a mom to three beautiful girls, roommate to one husband (ha) and custodian to 2 cats 2 dogs 2 cows and 5 chickens. She is laser focused on doing anything she can to help usher in positive social change by connecting people doing good things.
Colin Frost
Colin Frost is a business development professional with extensive experience helping SaaS businesses develop go-to-market strategies/channels and has worked with a range of SaaS solutions encompassing content management, marketplace platforms, stadium and food ordering apps and mobile communications.
In 2004 Colin joined Bardia Housman and Adam Broadway, the cofounders of Business Catalyst based out of Sydney. He was instrumental in bootstrapping the global partner network rollout that underpinned the organisation's strong growth trajectory. Business Catalyst was acquired by Adobe in 2009.
After the three year earn-out Colin and family, for personal reasons, repatriated to Australia and continued to consult in the tech arena around business growth and distribution strategies. In 2017, Colin returned to the US joining www.platformos.com as Director of Channels and Alliances. platformOS is a tech platform focused on delivering scalable collaborative sharing marketplace platforms for both enterprises and startups.
Neal Gorenflo
Neal Gorenflo is the Executive Director of Shareable, an award-winning nonprofit news outlet, action network, and consultancy focused on the latest innovations in resource sharing. He’s an author, speaker, consultant, movement builder, and editor of multiple books including, “ Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons.” In 2011, he co-founded the Sharing Cities movement, now in over 100 cities worldwide. He helps organizations around the world meet their goals through sharing including the Sharing Economy Association of Japan, Seoul Metropolitan Government, and the city of San Francisco. In 2020, blogged a one year life experiment called, The Year of Living Locally, to explore a more coherent, commons-based, and sustainable local lifestyle. As a social entrepreneur, Neal’s call to action is simple yet systemic: let’s share!
Della Duncan
Della is a Regenerative Economist. She teaches workshops and retreats about alternative economics around the world, supports individuals working to better align their values with their work as a Right Livelihood Coach, and offers consulting to organizations contributing to equitable and sustainable economic systems change. Della is also the host of the Upstream Podcast challenging traditional economic thinking through documentaries and interviews.
Della is a Senior Fellow of Social and Economic Equity at the International Inequalities Institute in the London School of Economics, the Course Development Manager of Fritjof Capra’s Capra Course on the Systems View of Life, a Gross National Happiness Master Trainer, a member of the 36x36 project (36 femxle change makers rethinking global economic frameworks), the Community Leader of Ingleside Community Power (a community-owned solar-power neighborhood cooperative), a founding member of the Doughnut Economics California Coalition (DECC) and a former faculty member of Ecological Economics at Schumacher College.
Joe Norman, PhD
Joe Norman is an applied complexity scientist with a focus on transforming insights gleaned from complex systems science into practical and implementable strategies and tactics for grappling with an increasingly uncertain and dynamic world. Joe is an Affilate at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, MA, an instructor at the Real World Risk Institute, and founder of Applied Complexity Science, LLC. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife where they are focusing their energy on homesteading and local agriculture on an old mill property that has been an actively running homestead for over 130 years.
Josh Heling
Josh Heling and his family run Hidden Savanna Farm, a permaculture-inspired small farm in the countryside outside of Madison, WI whose mission is to contribute to its local food economy while connecting people to each other and the natural environment. He's spent the last eight years starting the process of converting 10 acres of overgrown woodland to a perennial food system supporting the farm's pastured poultry and sheep operations. Hidden Savanna also acts as a hands-on learning lab for a variety of educational enrichment programs for elementary and middle-school aged kids.
Indoors, Josh has almost three decades of experience driving software product development as an executive and founder in organizations ranging from bootstrapped prototypes to VC-funded startups to scaled-up global enterprises. He is motivated by a passion for finding ways for network connectivity to unleash new opportunities for human collaboration and innovation.
PJ Connolly
PJ is a founding member of Just Capital Quotient, a social impact and sustainability consultancy focused on bringing about a new economy. He is also a recent graduate from Bard College’s MBA in Sustainability program focusing on bioregional regenerative economics, and comes from a background of varied experience, including commercial credit analysis, project coordination, and sales & marketing.
Although from the Midwest originally, PJ currently lives on the East Coast of Florida with his fiancée and finds fulfilment in pursuing anything that helps bring about a more flourishing, biodiverse, regenerative planet
Jon Jackson, PhD
Jon Jackson is an Assistant Professor at the Providence College School of Business in Rhode Island. He teaches courses in operations management, supply chain management, and business analytics. His research has been published in top-tier academic journals focusing on inventory management, retail operations, and supply chain modeling and logistics. Jon lives in Northern RI with his beautiful wife and daughter along with their dog and three cats. When not trapped indoors, Jon and family enjoy hiking and mountain biking all over the Northeast!