Coworkers, Makers and Hackers in the city : Reinventing policies, corporate strategies and citizenship ?

The world of work is changing. A century after moving from an agriculture-centered world to an Industrial one, from self-employed workers to salaried employees, our modern economies are slowly transitioning towards a new model: based on simultaneous collaboration and competition, the boundaries of contemporary organizations are blurring; information technologies are allowing individuals and companies to set base away from cities; shared working spaces are triggering new forms of collaborations between individuals and corporations.This White Paper aims at diagnosing key institutional tensions related to new work practices in the city, and putting forward questions and general propositions likely to overcome these tensions. The idea is to analyze how new collaborative communities and collaborative logics (of coworkers, hackers, makers, fabbers, and teleworkers) and more traditional collective activity and modes of decision making (of the city and corporations in the city) can jointly contribute to the co-production of harmonious new ways of life and new ways of working. Reinventing joint public policies, corporate strategies and citizenship appear here as a key stake where usual dichotomies between private-public, collaborative-non-collaborative economy, traditional citizens and hacktivists need to be overcome.We thus identify in this document a set of controversies around four strong political issues both for the city and the field of management, linked to the emergence of collaborative spaces:o Topic 1. Space, territories, and public policy on collaborative communities in the city;o Topic 2. Collaborative communities and their roles in education in the city;o Topic 3. Business models and their communication in the context of collaborative spaces and collaborative communities;o Topic 4. Collaborative spaces and their roles in innovation and entrepreneurial dynamics at the level of the cityBeyond our controversies, we underline three paradoxes which should be at the heart of new questions for policy-makers, hacktivists, actors of collaborative movements, and citizens (distinctions which may become less and less relevant in the years to come):o Social versus economic orientations of both the city and the collaborative communities it can host;o Critical/revolutionary versus more incremental relationships between cities, organizations, societies, collaborative communities, and new work practices;o Local territory (district/proximate area) grounded versus broader city-oriented or connectivity related issues about collaborative movement and new work practices.To balance these tensions, we elaborate seven general areas of questions and propositions for all stakeholders:o The generalization of infra-organization (physical collaborative platforms);o The emergence of “ ‘inclusive lab’ labels” (elaborated and managed by collaborative communities themselves);o A renewed academic presence in the city and in the country-side (with more virtual, distributed and ‘experiential’ logics);o Ephemeral and mobile labs managed jointly by public, collaborative and private stakeholders;o “Open open” innovation in public and semi-public spaces of the city;o Rise of mega-spaces for creativity in the city;o Development of a global infrastructure for coworkers, mobile workers and teleworkers.These are directions we see as particularly promising to manage the tensions, paradoxes and stakes explicated by our controversies.We hope that these questions and propositions will inspire both academics, politicians, hacktivists and entrepreneurs for future collaborations on the study and joint transformation of public policies, corporate strategies, and citizenship.