From bikeshare to data coop

Jul 28, 2018 | Co-operatives, Journal

Over the last couple of months I’ve been getting to know the team at Monash BikeShare. I’ve followed their intrepid lead, huffing and puffing my way around the Monash University campus. They’ve shared their stories of rebuff and conquest from their epic start-up trek. And their youthful enthusiasm leaves them with plenty of runway ahead to pursue some grand plans. All-in-all they’ve got a great springboard from which to pursue their bikeshare dreams…

Australia’s most successful bikeshare

So how did the team take an a unloved scheme and turn it into Australia’s most successful bike share? Like all well executed plans, it looks simple in hindsight.

Their first step was to implement the Donkey Kong model of user engagement – they identified the biggest barriers to user take-up and sought to remove them:

• Cost – the scheme was introduced with a membership fee structure that had proved an immediate disincentive to potential users. The team convinced Monash University that it would be better to have people using the bikes for free than to have those same bikes rusting in a shed.
• Awareness – Notwithstanding the relative visibility of the bikes around campus, there remained the problem of people’s awareness of how and when to use them. To solve this, the team sought to draw in separate groups within the campus to show how the bikes could directly benefit them. By ratcheting up their use by specific users, the team were able to increase the visibility of the bikes actually being used – and thereby tripping the tipping point for network effects.

Know your customer

There’s no doubt getting a critical mass of people to use the bikes was a great achievement for the team. Perhaps the more intriguing thing is their understanding of the way the business works. On the face of it, you’d think that the customers of the bikeshare are the folk who ride the bikes. Not so, say the team, they see their primary customer as Monash University. This starts to make sense when you break down the benefits.

When it is easier for people to get around the campus, Monash University can:

• Help IT and support staff get to where they are needed;
• Understand how people are moving across the campus;
• Infer which facilities and areas are being used – both in and out of term; and,
• Encourage better and more timely attendance by students.

We can start to see that the potential benefits of sharing schemes in a digitally connected world are not simply the immediate and most obvious ones around the consumer getting to use the bike. For a relatively small investment, Monash can start to generate some pretty interesting returns…

Bikeshare as a data coop

Which leads us to potentially the most interesting part of the conversation. If the customer of the bikeshare is Monash University, as it pays to derive the aforementioned benefits, what are users?

You could argue that they are the beneficiaries of a fabulous free service.

But we think there’s more to it than that. This is the same situation that has been played out in the models employed by Facebook, Twitter and anyone else that seeks to monetise the consumer. We get to use their platform, and they get to sell our attention and data. The costs of getting the platform up are minor compared to the payoff of locking in the network.

That’s why we believe that there is a different model. That this is the perfect opportunity for a new type of consumer coop – where the members benefit from using the bikes, and where the customers are those organisations that derive second order benefits. The members own the bikes, the data and the platform. The coop negotiates the terms with the customers.

Controlling our data

See this is about more than sharing bikes. As the mesh – as Lisa Gansky calls it – sends its tentacles ever deeper, the real world gets mapped in greater and greater virtual detail. So that while the sharing of assets and infrastructure get more efficient, so too does the information about those that are using them. Our customers want to know more about us.

You want to hop in that self-driving car? Sure just wave your chip, and we’ll map you into the grid. Think about the types of data that the self-driving car company will want on you. They’ll want to check that you wear deodorant and haven’t trashed any self-driving cars lately. Our reputation will be built by the things we do and the data exhaust that comes with it.

Regular readers will know that I believe data coops offer a way through to the next place. That our personal data is best managed in ways that enables the individual to maximise control while still allowing the collective to optimise value in aggregate. Having had a good look at the Monash BikeShare, it looks like a great place for the personal data revolution to start….

When algorithms rule the world