Purpose-The purpose of this paper is to report on an action research project with two emergent micro-businesses that explored how their business model connected with the principles of open source. Design/methodology/approach-We first gained initial qualitative data to establish the core values of each micro-business, which we then explored in the context of open source and business models in two design workshops with each organisation. Findings-We developed the open source guild business model, which has the elements of: building a focal micro-business with resources secured through the guild, promoting learning and development through apprenticeship, promoting shared values through a commons of experience and capturing value by protecting key intellectual property. Research limitations/implications-This research was undertaken with two emergent microbusinesses in the North West of England. Further research will be needed to establish the wider applicability of the open source guild model. Practical implications-The open source guild model can be a mechanism for an emergent microbusiness to create a community around their values and grow their business without conventional external investment of resources. Originality/value-This research contributes to the literature on business models based on open source and how these models can be sustainable in terms of the quadruple bottom line, which extends the triple bottom line to include personal values and meaning.

As the collaborative platform economy develops, network effects tend to create one dominant platform within each domain such as transport, reducing the power of workers to find alternatives. The research problem is to find a specific methodology that could enable researchers to draw on the experience of participants as workers and their wish to create ways of working that offer them greater power in the collaborative economy. Ethnographic studies can enable researchers to discover how workers make sense of their involvement in the collaborative platform economy and provide valuable data on how current business models and platforms can affect worker power. However, a wish to promote worker power implies a participatory form of research that aims to break down power relations between researchers and participants. This chapter reflects on the methodological challenges of studying the collaborative economy ethnographically in order to develop new business models and platforms. Annotated portfolios, a technique used in human-computer interaction, offers the potential to enable worker experience to inform new business model designs. Researchers can use annotated portfolios to articulate latent designs in ethnographic data gathered from engagement with workers in the collaborative economy. In bringing these designs into existence, researchers can then contribute their perspective to a co-design process with these workers. Annotated portfolio techniques can thus help both researchers and workers to use ethnographic data to design new business models in the collaborative economy.

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Digital networking technology has helped to bring about the platform economy, in which online networking sites mediate between individual freelance workers and their temporary employers. However, the digital platform economy undermines traditional forms of collective action, particularly trade unions. Following reflections on 15 years of trade union software quality assurance initiatives, particularly the Swedish UserAward program, we realize that there are potential benefits in combining aspects of cooperative, guild, and trade union models in the context of the platform economy. We examine the role that these models could play in enabling new forms of collective action and we bring them together in the form of a conceptual model which we have called the Platform Review Alliance Board. We articulate the Platform Review Alliance model as a set of design patterns, which we invite stakeholders to comment on, refine, and ultimately subscribe to. We then apply these design patterns in the domain of transport. In this domain, we show how software producers, users of the software, and other stakeholders, including individual transport providers, can participate in a Review Alliance Board for the commissioning, production, and review of software platforms for transport systems. The contribution we make is to propose how membership in a Review Alliance Board can be an alternative strategy for both software producers and trade union representatives in taking collective action to assure the quality of workplace software in the context of the growing platform economy.