Digital Labor

Marina Gorbis

person  

Marina Gorbis is Executive Director of the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit research and consulting organization based in Silicon Valley. She has brought a futures perspective to hundreds of organizations in business, education, government and philanthropy. Marina has blogged and written for BoingBoing.net, FastCompany and major media outlets, and is a frequent speaker on future organizational, technology, and social issues. Marina’s current research focus is social production and how it is changing the face of major industries, a topic explored in detail in her 2013 book The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World. Recently Marina and a group of colleagues launched Workable Futures Initiative at the Institute for the Future with the aim of developing a deeper understanding of new work patterns and to prototype a generation of Positive Platforms for work. Follow Marina on Twitter: @mgorbis.

Designing a Generation of Positive Platforms
Platforms are the new operating system for how we create value and get things done in the connected and highly data-driven environment. This new operating system has produced some great and some not-so-great outcomes, like all technologies. The same platforms that are eliminating middle-class jobs might be deployed to support decent wages through more efficient work-matching, democratized access to means of production, collective leveraging of resources, and greater alignment of platform owners’ and workers’ incentives. Design of platforms can effect their potential positive and negative externalities. What can we do at the level of design that is embedded in technologies themselves to ensure positive outcomes? One of the goals of the Institute for the Future Workable Future Initiative is to engage designers, economists, and policy experts in thinking about what a generation of Positive Platforms would look like and how we can use the levers we have—from governance and ownership, to funding and technology design choices—to build a new generation of Positive Platforms.

 
​The Design for Co-Op Apps
Sat, November 14
04:00 PM - 05:50 PM

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