2026-07-10 –, Idea Stage
Grounded practices, real cases, and alternative financing tools. The question is no longer whether the current model is broken; most people in the room already know it is. The real question is more demanding: what approaches already exist that allows us to fund democratic digital infrastructure differently, and what still needs to be invented? This session focuses on concrete practices from the Social and Solidarity Economy: cooperative financing, civic crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, and public-commons partnerships capable of sustaining technologies that serve collective needs rather than extractive growth.
P2P financing models in cooperative ecosystems (Ela Kagel & Andreas Arnold, Platform Coops eG)
Digital communities increasingly depend on infrastructure they do not own. Platforms extract value, financial systems centralise decision-making, and communities often struggle to sustain the technologies they collectively build. Ela Kagel and Andreas Arnold, co-founders of Platform Coops eG in Berlin, will explore three interconnected layers of cooperative economy-building.
The first is pooling resources collectively — organising shared demand, shared ownership, and cooperative governance to keep value circulating within communities rather than flowing outward.
The second is peer-to-peer finance and community capital — reclaiming tools such as lending, crowdfunding, solidarity funds, and cooperative banking as instruments governed directly by communities.
The third is creating our own means of exchange — exploring digital currencies, community-based monetary systems, and cooperative stablecoin experiments as emerging infrastructure for democratic coordination.
Drawing on experiences from cooperative movements and Web3 experimentation, the workshop connects historical cooperative practices with contemporary decentralised technologies — from cooperative marketplaces and community banks to Circles UBI, Breadchain, and quadratic funding. Through guided discussion and collaborative exercises, participants will examine how these mechanisms already emerge within their own communities, and how they might be redesigned to better support solidarity, sustainability, and collective autonomy.
No prior knowledge of finance, cooperatives, or Web3 is required — only curiosity about how communities can build and sustain their own economic systems together.
Wouter Tebbens is an industrial engineer born and raised in The Netherlands working from Barcelona. He works for a knowledge society based in human freedom, solidarity, care and regeneration through commons-cooperative networks. He has co-founded and participates in various cooperatives and social organisations.
In the 2000s he set up the Free/Libre and Open Source working group of the Internet Society Netherlands, co-founded the Free Knowledge Institute and coordinated two European Commission funded projects: the SELF project and the Free Technology Academy and participated in various others.
In the last decade he participated in Som Energia, the Spanish renewable energy cooperative; the School of the Commons Barcelona; was part of the p2p value research team studying >300 cases of commons-based p2p internet platforms; participated in the Digital DIY project on legal, ethical and economic aspects related to digital fabrication and DIY; co-founded The Things Network Catalonia and ran various pilots and projects with various municipalities around sensor data through the community network.
In order to seek sustainability for commons-oriented initiatives he conceived the Five Pillar model. In the context especially of la Comunificadora, a programme from Barcelona City to help teams create their commons-collaborative economy project, this model was developed further as the core organising model with specific canvases and workshop methodologies.
Wouter was one of the artifices behind the creation of the cooperative femProcomuns and helped create the initial projects and move them from under the wings of the FKI to the cooperative, including CommonsCloud, the open community network for the Internet of Things and the commons transition group.
Since the pandemic he has been an operational member of The Online Meeting Cooperative (meet.coop), he has worked as the first director of the PublicSpaces Foundation in The Netherlands, is a collaborator at Commons Network and works in various projects to advance a commons-cooperative-regenerative vision.
Andreas Arnold is a Berlin-based social entrepreneur, cooperative strategist, and connector working at the intersection of the cooperative economy, Web3, and community-driven innovation. Trained as an Industrial Engineer and Management expert, he has spent the past 15 years exploring the transition from the sharing economy toward platform cooperatives and decentralized economic systems.
As co-founder and board member of Platform Coops eG, Andreas supports founders and organizations in building cooperative digital business models, governance structures, and alternative financing approaches. His work spans blockchain ecosystems, DAOs, DGOV, marketplaces, and cooperative finance — with a current focus on cooperative stablecoins and community-owned financial infrastructures.
Previously, Andreas led the digitalization and marketplace development for the freelancer cooperative SMartDe eG, coordinated marketplace strategy for the blockchain-based UBI project Circles, and advised Circles Coop eG on cooperative and ecosystem development.