Background
FairBnB.coop is a cooperative platform that offers a community-centered alternative to short-term holiday rental platforms like Airbnb and facilitates authentic, sustainable, and intimate travel experiences.
The platform is collectively owned and governed by those who use it and are impacted by its use: hosts, guests, local business owners, and neighbors.
To support the local communities, part of the platform profits are reinvested in Local Fair Projects that counter the negative effects of tourism. Locals will vote to support those projects they want to sustain in their neighborhoods: food coops, playgrounds, green projects, and community cafés.
The Problem
In 2019 FairBnB.coop was yet to be launched, though its value proposition was already public and its community growing.
The growth potential of the platform was not achievable through simple market competition, as stronger market leaders were already too solidly positioned.
The longest leverage to get to sustainability was to be found in the core value proposition of the platform: local communities.
To foster the early adoption of the platform by hosts, guests, and other stakeholders, a well motivated network of local communities had to be initiated.
The Local Nodes (LNs) are the entities of the FairBnB.coop ecosystem that are responsible for promoting the local adoption of the platform.
This includes catalysing meetings and collaboration between the potential stakeholders, identifying the Local Fair Projects to be funded through the revenues of the platform, define Local Fair Policies that are compliant with local by-laws.
The LNs are responsible for becoming the catalysts of a vibrant ecosystem that can foster a positive sum game between the global dimensions (the guests) and the local dimension (the local community of all the stakeholders).
At the time of my involvement in this project, no LN was active yet.
How to get to a bottom-up organic activation of LNs was the problem to be addressed.
Role and team
I worked in strict team collaboration with three civic designers from the network CivicWise and with one of the founders of FairBnB.coop.
We had to define a clear journey that could lead motivated people around the world from the discovery of the platform's value proposition all the way to becoming a Local Ambassador.
We also had to design the process and tools to catalyse the activation of Local Nodes.
A significant part of the job consisted of leading online workshops and brainstorming sessions with FairBnB.coop executives to clarify and give structure to their ideas by opening different perspectives.