We are convening one hundred fifty speakers from over thirty countries to meet each other, co-design, and learn about a wide range of topics: 

• worker power in the platform economy,
• antitrust,
• misogyny and racism in co-ops,
• ecological sustainability,
• best practices for cooperation including the allocation of startup funding,
• the potential of platform co-ops for data trusts,
• data co-ops,
• new models for distributed governance,
• and data sovereignty.

Highlights include Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All in conversation with Wilma Liebman, former chair of the NLRB.

Policy facilitators 

Kirsten Gillibrand, United States Senator; John Martin McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer (opposition Finance Minister) of the Labour Party, UK; Dieter Janecek, member of the German Bundestag;  New York Assemblymember Ron Kim,

Platform co-op founders

Mensakas, Equal Care Co-op, Up&Go, Salus Coop, Fairbnb, Smart, 

Fairmondo, NeedsMap, Stocksy United, Cataki, Cotabo, Resonate, Core Staffing Cooperative, 

Scholars 

Juliet Schor, Mark Graham, Joseph Blasi, Jack Qiu, Gar Alperovitz, Sandeep Vaheesan, Koray Caliskan, Jessica Gordon-Nemhard, 

platform co-op incubators and other organizations providing infrastructure support

Start.coop, Unfound, Sharetribe, IDRC

Tech co-ops 

Sassafras, CoLab, Startin’blox, Cooper Systems

Allied community groups 

Sixth Street Youth Program, Techo, Peer to Peer Foundation, Young Farmers of America, Data 4 Black Lives, The New School Hip Hop Collective, The Fairwork Foundation

Union and co-op leaders

United States, Japan, Indonesia, France, Sweden, and India.

Coming to us from Zambia, Hip Hop artist PilAto, a.k.a Zambia’s Voice of Inequality, will perform a remake of Childish Gambino’s This Is America. The New School Hip Hop Collective will stage a night of Liberation. Prof. Daniel Blake and his Music for Political Action Fall 2019 course at The New School selected and researched the history of songs that relate to our event. You’ll hear them in the breaks. Stefania de Kenessey and vocalists Lisa Daehlin (soprano) and Waundell Saavedra (bass) will perform their live rendition of the platform co-op anthem! 

Lastly, the artist Gabo Camnitzer will stage a children’s strike with Sixth Street Youth Project, and a film screening with Astra Taylor (in person). 

Convened by

Trebor Scholz with support from Michael McHugh

REGISTER NOW

Lead image: spinning lights by aaronisnotcool 

The post Who Owns The World? The 5th conference on Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Friends,

This has been a difficult but also consequential year for many of us. Beyond the political chaos, we bore witness to the “Death of Tumblr,” the pushback against Upwork’s time-tracking software, and compelling scholarly analysis of Uber’s role in the labor market. Facebook gave Netflix and Spotify access to the private messages of its users. Elizabeth Warren joined the ranks of those calling for the breakup of tech monopolies, which could open the gates for the formation of new cooperatives.

Supporting economic alternatives to these monopolies, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) in New York City is a hub for advancing the cooperative digital economy. Throughout the past year, I had the opportunity to work with emerging co-ops in this network all over the world. 

These encounters have been deeply inspiring. I noticed six trends: 
– a vast interest in protocolary co-ops, distributed ledger technologies, and open co-ops,

– the emergence of platform co-ops in different forms and sectors across countries (with particular foci, for instance, on digital infrastructure or labor markets),

– a growing number of Ph.D. students taking up this new area of research,

– an intensified focus on antitrust measures against tech monopolies,

– an overall upswing in employee ownership in the U.S.,

– the lingering challenges for scaling, such as insufficient startup funding, the “Crypto crash,” and meaningful distributed governance mechanisms.

Which trends did YOU notice? Please write us at [email protected]

First, a few notes on policy developments. The PCC Policy Team, led by Hal Plotkin, wrote a “New Bill of Rights for American Workers Building Support for Cooperatively-Owned Businesses that are Democratically-Owned and Governed” for U.S. Senator Gillibrand who had solicited legislation to promote platform co-ops on the heels of her Main Street Employee Ownership Act. At a large public event at the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), Andrea Nahles, the leader of the SPD in Germany, made platform cooperativism part of the party’s political platform inspired by my book Uberworked and Underpaid. Learn more.

Also in 2018, PCC & Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC) in Toronto received an economic development grant from Google.org, which helped us to start work on the Platform Co-op Development Kit on July 1, 2018. Don’t take my word for it, read this article in Fast Company.

At Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic on Platform Cooperativism, I started to collaborate with the HLS team hoping to find ways to make the legal side of incorporating a platform co-ops easier. This work will continue in 2019, possibly involving additional partners.

Together with Michelle D’Souza and Dana Ayotte at the IDRC I started to work with an emerging platform co-op at SEWA in Ahmedabad, India.

Colin Clark of the IDRC began the co-design process with CoRise Cooperative, a large group of child care providers in Illinois.

We also started conversations with Cataki, a co-op organizing recycling collectors in Brazil and the social care co-op This Cooperative Life in Australia.

We took first steps toward collaborating with refugee women in Hamburg, Germany.

If you are interested in getting involved with our work on the Kit, please contact us at [email protected].

The PCC will continue to work on the Development Kit in 2019, which will also involve redesigning platform.coop in the spring (get involved here). 

Also in the spring, a PCC researcher will approach all platform co-ops with a survey to compile information on the existing companies in the ecosystem with the purpose of advancing the directory. Please let us know if you are aware of any platform co-op that may not be on our radar just yet. Email [email protected]. We want to hear from you.

Anand Giridharadas’ best-selling book Winner Takes All helped introduce our work to many people who had not heard about it. Publications like StirToAction, YES! Magazine, The Guardian, The Nation, Washington Post, and Shareable have covered much of the platform co-op work around the world. Thank you!

PCC’s Michael McHugh introduced the French Government to our work. I presented our activist work and research on the digital cooperative economy at venues ranging from PDF in NYC (video), Re:Publica in Berlin (Germany), Columbia University, Open Society Foundation in London, Harvard University Law Forum in Boston (US), RightsCon in Toronto (Canada), Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid (Spain), SharingForum in Seoul (South Korea), the SPD Headquarter in Berlin (Germany), and Chinese University in Hong Kong (China).

PCC’s Michael McHugh attended Rutgers’ SMLR Union and Worker Ownership conference in Washington DC and the ICA research conference. Also in 2018, at Cooperatives UK, Pat Conaty published the important report “Working Together: Trade Union and Co-operative Innovations for Precarious Work.”

In Silicon Valley, I had a chance to meet with 45 leaders of Brazilian transportation cooperatives who showed interest in developing a national platform co-op. In Seoul, I met with the Association of Worker Co-ops, members of the government, and the Domestic Workers Alliance, which were interested in committing resources to this new sector.

In Hong Kong, together with Jack Qiu and Terence Yue, I co-convened our annual platform co-op conference. My Chinese colleagues started the Platform Co-op Consortium Hong Kong and Jack & Terence also co-authored a book on platform cooperativism in Mandarin. You can read this article, published in the local press, see photos or read my article in News.Coop.

Also in Hong Kong, David Li suggested not only launching a new co-op phone — an inexpensive smartphone produced and sold with platform co-ops preinstalled for the 1 billion co-op members worldwide — but he also proposed unionized manufacturing co-ops that produce robots as a way to empower unions. YES! Magazine published a piece to similar ends: “When Robots Take Our Jobs, Platform Cooperatives Are a Solution”

After a successful Platform Cooperativism meeting in Brussels that was supported by the Brussels Capital Region (!), in 2019, watch out for more activities on the amazingly designed website of Platform Co-op Brussels. Also don’t miss Lieza Dessin’s article “Zebras are Real and Move in Herds.”

In London, Oli Sylvester-Bradley and others successfully convened Open Coop 2018.

In Berlin, the platform co-op series at Supermarkt continued and a group of students published the first Platform Coop magazine. Read a report of one of the pc events in German.

In Indonesia, the first event on platform co-ops took place in Purwokerto.

In the United States, a panel at SXSW and events in Oakland and Berkeley engaged more people.

In 2018, Jen Horonjeff, founder of Savvy, the first patient-owned platform co-op, was named one of 50 most daring entrepreneurs of 2018. Up&Go was joined by Apple Eco-Cleaning co-op. In Seoul, South Korea, SanKu Jo is about to launch WeHome, a protocolary co-op for short-term rentals. In Montreal, Dardan Isufi and his team launched Eva, a new platform co-operative developing a blockchain-based rideshare app. (Read the white paper). The Guardian covered the platform co-op Resonate, which also received a million dollars from the venture arm of Rchain.coop.

In Japan, Anju Ishiyama wrote an article predicting that platform co-ops will flourish in Japan. Also Wired Japan covered the work of the PCC at The New School.

In 2019, Fairbnb will start to operate in Barcelona, Bologna, and Amsterdam. The team around Sito Veracruz and Damiano Avellino worked incredibly hard. Many challenges remain but finally, this ambitious, much-needed, and highly anticipated project will become reality.

Michael and I started PCC Community Chats with Ela Kagel, Micky Metts, and Nathan Schneider who introduced his new book Everything for Everybody.

In its annual report, FairShares Association outlines its support for the platform co-op ecosystem (see video). Fairshares Association enables people to set up cooperative businesses that are held accountable by all the stakeholders. Thank you, Rory Ridley-Duff.

Ours to Hack and to Own, the book I edited with Nathan Schneider was selected as one of the Top Tech Books of 2017 by Wired Magazine, early in 2018. MJ Kaplan wrote a piece on platform cooperativism for Non-Profit Quarterly. Sandeep Vaheesan and Nathan Schneider published a paper “Cooperative Enterprise as an Antimonopoly Strategy.”

Michael McHugh and I compiled a portfolio on platform cooperativism.

Together with Jutta Treviranus, I authored a commissioned 70-page research report for Sidewalk Labs Toronto exploring how a Smart Cities could be organized as a data cooperative.

After reporting on platform co-ops at the Biennale Della Cooperazione and the Frankfurter Buchmesse (Frankfurt Bookfair), Francesca Fo Martinelli authored a working paper on platform cooperativism in a publication of Fondazione Tarantelli. Many thanks also to Chiara Chiappa at Fondazione Centro Studi Doc for her work. Francesca has become a leading figure of the platform co-op movement in Italy.

Martijn Arets penned “Airbnb as a cooperative: a viable scenario?”

Armin Steurnagel delivered a TEDX talk in which he argued for the transformation of ownership models to create a better economy.

Stacco Troncoso posted the blog essay “The Open Coop Governance Model in Guerrilla Translation: an Overview.” Stacco also wrote a case study of Fairmondo.

Michel Bauwens spoke in many venues on open cooperativism, the token economy, and distributed ledgers for co-ops.

Don’t miss Prosper Wanner’s text on Les Oiseaux de Passage, a platform coop for short-term rental. Prosper also responded to my series of articles in the French Socialter.

George Zarkadakis authored “Do platforms work? The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom” and Menno van Ginkel wrote “Leveraging blockchain technologies and platform cooperativism for decentralized food networks and short food supply chains.”

Looking ahead to 2019, I’ll be focusing on:

– the Platform Co-op Development Kit, and a research report that we will conduct on SEWA and the viability of platform co-ops and distributed governance in the context of India, supported by the Open Society Foundation.

– our international platform co-op conference November 7-9, 2019 at The New School & Columbia University, which will mark ten years of research and conferences on digital labor at The New School in NYC. Save the date!!!

– my next book, which is well in the making; I hope to finish the manuscript in 2019. If you have a notable new platform co-op, get in touch and share your experiences.

– additional in-person research and platform co-op events in Japan, Brazil, Austria, Germany, South Africa, Mexico, Spain, Tunisia, Georgia, Australia, and India (Kerala & Gujarat).

In April 2019, we will launch the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy with a fellowship program. The first year will be by invitation only but in 2020, we’ll open up the application process.

I’d like to thank all co-ops, scholars, policymakers, technologists, and activists who have worked with us in the last year. Keep it up in 2019. Our doors are open— get involved with our platform co-op work.

Happy New Year, everybody!

~ Trebor Scholz

The post 2018 and Onward: Where we are at with Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Co-op leaders, students, researchers, programmers, open source activists, and freelancers from various sectors came to the CUHK campus in the hills above Hong Kong, a short train ride from Shenzhen. During the conference, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium Hong Kong was launched with its own website, as was a new Chinese-language book on platform co-ops entitled 平台點合作.

There were several reasons for bringing the event to Hong Kong this year.

As platform cooperativism expands, we need to develop our thinking and practices also outside of a European and Anglo-American context. Countries like Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan all have vibrant co-op communities and long histories of mutual aid. Platform co-ops can and should learn from these diverse contexts. With 60% of the world’s population living in Asia, and with significant social and political challenges in the years ahead, the co-operative digital economy has the potential to make a significant impact on a number of pressing issues. From how to care for an ageing population, a growing number of refugees, worsening economic inequality, and the growth of the informal economy, platform co-ops and our Platform Coop Development Kit can improve the conditions and rights of workers, and help answer these challenges.

This year’s event used the agrarian metaphor of “sowing the seeds” to explore how platform cooperativism – and its key principles of broad-based platform ownership, democratic governance, open source, and co-design — can take root in Asia.

Participants heard from a range of co-operative entrepreneurs, scholars, activists, and hackers who shared their insights on everything from platforms used by rural co-ops in Taiwan to new developments in peer-to-peer licensing.

Conference conveners Jack Qui, Terence Yuen, and Trebor Scholz led panels that forged connections between diverse topics, from the use of blockchain technologies for refugee co-ops to considering new pathways for platform co-ops in Asia.

On the first day of the conference we focused on resources and organisations emerging across south-east Asia. Representing the Japanese Cooperative Alliance, Osamu Nakano documented the growth of the co-op movement in Japan which now counts 65 million members. Nakano emphasized the long term commitment of Japanese worker co-ops to platform cooperativism.

Namya Mahajan, managing director of the Federated Self Employed Women’s Association (Sewa) in India, spoke about how Sewa supports more than 106 co-ops with a membership of more than 300,000. Mahajan outlined the “Sewa Way” and its unique approach to organising informal workers through a hybrid union and co-op model. She also reported how the collaboration with the Platform Co-op Development Kit had started.

Participants learned about the Smangus Aboriginal Community Labor Co-op in Taiwan, which was the subject of a recent Peabody Award-winning documentary, and its unique ability to motivate their young to stay and work for the co-op instead of moving to the city. Presenters also discussed the critical work of the Nangtang farming co-op in mainland China and the Alliance of Taiwan Foodbanks in Taiwan. All three groups participated in a hackathon in the days prior to the conference, prototyping new digital platforms for their organisations. Project ideas were based on Smangus’s need for a new platform to organise their recent surge of eco-tourists and the Taiwanese Foodbank’s need for a better digital platform that could improve the efficiency of receiving and disbursing food donations.

From South Korea, Changbok You showcased Sungmisan, an inspiring urban village in Seoul that offers residents a variety of co-operative living practices to combat inequality and social fragmentation.

Indonesian entrepreneur Henri Kasyfi discussed a new co-operative platform that can facilitate payment by facial recognition technology, specifically helping street merchants and the country’s poorest businesses. Also discussing new hardware possibilities, David Li, who founded the first Maker Lab in China, spoke about the possibilities for tech development in Shenzhen. With the Chinese city’s rapid rise as an industrial center for tech production, many formerly expensive commercial products can now be produced at astonishingly low prices. His lecture sparked a discussion about the potential for a new co-operative phone or co-operative hardware to be distributed by large co-ops. It also raised concerns about the social and ecological costs of such low-cost production.

As part of her spirited presentation, Gigi Lo showcased her project Translate for Her, which supports ethnic minority women living in Hong Kong who cannot read Chinese. Translate for Her allows these women to complete daily tasks like signing a lease for an apartment, or understanding their children’s report cards. The Singing Cicadas group, a small Hong-Kong-based production company of film-makers, writers, and illustrators focused on social justice storytelling, presented their decision to become a co-op.

Renowned sociologist Pun Ngai, co-author of Dying for Apple: Foxconn and Chinese Workers, argued that China’s revolution of 1949 is still unfinished – and that it now must challenge class conflicts within the global capitalist system. The challenge for platform cooperativism in Hong Kong, she argued, is to not become an empty slogan but to turn it into “a social movement embedded in real struggles”.

Trebor Scholz at the conference

Later, as a counterweight to some of these arguments, Melina Morrison, CEO of the Australian Business Council of Cooperatives and Mutuals, spoke about the strong state of the co-op movement and how it continues to grow and employ more workers, both in Australia and around the world.

Michel Bauwens argued that the rise of blockchain technology is being used to create a world where community and trust are absent. Bauwens imagines a post-blockchain world where – somewhere in the force field between public benefit and profits – platform co-ops and protocolary co-ops, as well as other organisational forms, could thrive.

Huang Sun-Quan, director of the Institute of Network Society at the China Academy of Art, discussed the unique coding and design dimensions of platform co-ops, arguing against “digital gentrification” in which only the rich members of communities benefit from technological developments.

The day concluded with a panel exploring platforms that use co-operative thinking for design and implementation. Jack Qiu calls them “amphibious platforms.” Although not formally platform co-ops, by attending the conference these groups can consider ways to integrate platform co-op principles into their work.

Panelists included Hong Kong entrepreneur Albert Liu who is developing a new ride-sharing programme for the city, and Jessamine Pacis from the Foundation for Media Alternatives in the Philippines. Pacis’ work focuses on the rapid growth of in-home cleaning services, which leaves workers rights in a grey area without clear legal protections. Platform co-ops are a workable, clear alternative. Ali Ercan presented his work on Needs Map based in Turkey, which directly connects people willing to make in-kind contributions with neighbours who have matching material or volunteer needs.

And panelist Nashin Mahtani, representing the PetaBencana group in Indonesia, outlined how their platform uses real-time information to deal with floods and urban disasters. With some of the highest concentrations of social media users in the world, Indonesians are constantly tweeting and posting about flooding. PetaBencana transforms this data into actionable information by hijacking it from social media platforms through an open source technology called Cognicity, and posts it to an open and accessible online map to give citizens up-to-date information on flooding.

Day 2 of the conference focused on how platform co-ops are emerging around the world, and how everyday users can democratically own and operate platforms regardless of their location.

Trebor Scholz opened the day by bringing greetings from a group of 45 taxi co-op leaders in Brazil, with whom he had just met. Trebor provided an update and analysis of the movement, explaining that the co-operative digital economy looks different from country to country. Over the past year, co-ops generally have continued to gain some momentum. New platform co-ops are popping up in new industries continuously. Through the Platform Co-op Development Kit, the New School team and developers from the Inclusive Design Research Centre will jump-start burgeoning platform co-ops and create a new online hub, sharing resources and facilitating learning. Learn more about this work here and write to [email protected] if you can think of ways in which you want to get involved in your country.

Participants from around the world followed, giving short updates on their projects.

Felix Weth of Fairmondo.de in Germany discussed his experience setting up a co-operatively run online marketplace. It was challenging: he had to learn to emphasise, and even prioritise, a sustainable co-operative business model first, which would enable the social benefits of the co-op model. Sharetribe co-founder and CEO Juho Makkonen called for a diversified digital economy and discussed how his company focuses on convenient platform hosting, so that anyone can start an online labour or market platform in a short period of time.

From France, Edith Darren presented on CoopCycle, an open source platform co-op focused on helping bicycle delivery workers become owners of their own food delivery platforms. Edith and her colleagues had attended the New York City conference in 2017 with just a nascent idea in mind. They proudly presented at this year’s event to show their progress, giving thanks to the numerous connections, insights, and encouragement from the previous conference.

Geddup.com, based in Australia, is a community action platform for trade unions, co-operatives, and schools that is currently converting to a platform co-op. Geddup allows groups to organise events, recruit volunteers, undertake votes, and gather feedback online. Co-founder Rohan Clarke outlined how co-operatives and social organisations can communicate better, maximise responses, and reward progress through the platform. Rohan also shared great notes from his experience at the 2018 conference which you can read here.

Danny Spitzberg from CoLab Co-op shared out results from the co-opathon, and updated participants on two of CoLab’s current projects. The first is helping to develop a cleaning co-operative called Up&Go in New York City, and the second is establishing a temporary staffing service called Core Staffing in Baltimore. Core Staffing is owned and operated by returning citizens, or previously incarcerated individuals.

Stephen Gill presented on CoopExchange, “the world’s first crypto exchange dedicated to buying and selling co-operative tokens”. Check out more videos about this work and follow the launch of their app on Twitter.

Swedish union leader Fredrik Söderqvist shared updates from Unionen, Sweden’s largest union, which organises private sector, white collar professionals into unions. In recent years, Unionen’s work has focused on standardising contracts for digital enterprises, and helping emerging platform co-ops and unions create new labour contracts and standardised regulations. From Smart.coop in Belgium, Lieza Dessein discussed the 20-year history and success of their mutual risk platform co-operative, which focuses on protecting freelancers against wage theft and late payment while also offering social benefits and co-working spaces. Freelancers become employees of SMart.coop and then share resources like accountants and lawyers, but continue to work independently as artists, writers, and digital creatives. Through their online platform, SMart.coop scaled significantly and now serves more than 85,000 members across Europe.

Next, a roundtable discussion focused on how blockchain technology could scale and reshape platform co-ops. Panel chair Jeff Xiong and Trebor Scholz asked the panelists to explore several key questions. These included how, beyond all the hype, blockchain can in fact facilitate better business practices – and what it can do right now. Panelists explored if and how blockchain can scale, and how to overcome problems with ecological sustainability. Tat Lam, for example, reported about his fascinating work assisting refugees with blockchain-supported identities. One of China’s first bloggers, Isaac Mao, discussed the use of blockchain technology for music.

Jack Qiu concluded day 2 by circling back to the theme of “Sowing the Seeds”. Through presentations, conversations, panels and group discussions, participants helped plant new seeds for the co-op movement in Asia and around the world. Though some of this nurturing and growth may be going on underneath the ground, and not readily apparent, the work continues to expand, creating a new network of roots and a new ecosystem. How quickly and intensely this ecosystem will flourish depends on the continued dedication of organisers, researchers, co-operative workers, and on additional support from traditional co-ops and philanthropic VCs stepping up to nurture this work.

Through the conference, practitioners and activists across Asia were able to share ideas, and plot a co-operative future of work. In this way, the event meaningfully showcased the diversity, open-endedness, and exploratory nature of many co-ops emerging in the region. Critical thinking and inspirational imagining of possible futures was balanced with real-world, on-the-ground examples of co-operatives and technologies succeeding right now.

But participants agreed that larger, traditional co-operatives need to do more to help nascent platform co-ops develop. Many debated and discussed how large-scale co-op federations and enterprises can do more to serve the weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Others asked how co-operatives can spread worker ownership and workplace democracy also throughout the supply chains that they rely on. Cognisant of the need to take formal steps to address these issues themselves, Platform Cooperativism Consortium members agreed that platform co-ops should work towards adopting a form of certification such as that by the Fairwork Foundation, to ensure that workers’ rights are protected.

As we look ahead to 2019, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium is excited to mark the ten-year anniversary of digital labor conferences at The New School. Please save the date for our annual conference next year to be held on November 7-9, 2019 at The New School in New York City.

See a photo album of the event here.

New to this work? Click here to learn more about the growing and global platform co-op movement.

The post The Platform co-op movement gathers in Hong Kong for its global conference appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Stop Chasing Unicorns

Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini: There is a fundamental flaw in the narrative of the startup culture: everyone is chasing Unicorns i.e. private companies valued at one billion dollars or more. Instead of aspiring to this elusive goal, should we not pause and wonder if it is really worth it? Rather, we should ask ourselves: is it really worth it? How much does society benefit from these companies when one does not merely consider their financial value? This focus on monetary valorization results in forgiving much of the negative impact they may have on their environment: the working conditions they provide, their general social impact and the redistribution of their value.

Collectively, we got lost in the rush for innovation. In the era of digitalization where solutions are only a few clicks away, we are looking for instant gratification. We subcontract daily tasks, decision-making and management to softwares that indicate the most efficient solutions. This process creates an ultra-competitive society where it is difficult to find space for human involvement nature, its diversity, its inherent complexities and our well-being. Instead, we trust simplistic binary solutions provided by digital platforms that often help us solve minor inconveniences, whilst creating ethical loopholes.

Lieza Dessein and Chiara Faini

Platform Co-op: a Disruptive Narrative

Entrepreneurship within specific social territories is a complex matter. In order to create a company that truly makes a positive impact, there is a need for a complex balance between all stakeholders and their environment. Businesses driven by values rather than mere profit do exist. These social enterprises have proven to be sustainable, even if they do not always seek global dominance. Legally, they are often constituted under the cooperative entity or coops.

What if digital platforms were also structured as coops? What would happen if platforms allowed members to vote on the use of their personal data? Or how the value that the platform generates is redistributed? What if users had their say in the strategies implemented to ensure a sustainable development?

Luckily, these questions are not just hypothetical. Numerous companies are attempting ethical digital ventures. Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider have developed an impressive corpus of publications over the past three years. Their work provides the framework for a strong narrative that highlights the existence of this sector under the label Platform Cooperativism.

The term gained rapid traction as existing companies recognize their values in this specific narrative. Ethical digital start ups flocked to this specific labeling because it embodies what they are trying to achieve.

. Zebras have two advantages: they are real and, since they strongly believe in cooperation, they move in herds.

The strength of the PlatformCoop Movement is that it creates an alternative narrative for digital entrepreneurship by highlighting existing initiatives as well as the challenges ahead. The diversity of the actors involved in the movement creates a slow but consistent progress in the growth of this sector of the digital economy.

The way our current business models are structured and financed is intimately linked to the dominant neoliberal narrative. It is structurally more difficult for a platform co-op to emerge as there still is too little formalized know-how available. Moreover, the existing financing models are not always adequate. While new Zebras are struggling to emerge, they are also fighting an unfair battle with wannabe Unicorns. These opponents are able to move faster due to suitable financing models, and the lack of regulation and ethics. A shift in this economic paradigm will require time and patience.

There is still a long way to go to make a structural change. If we want to succeed we will need to continue to organize the movement by strengthening our emerging networks and its narrative. Additionally, we will need to embrace patience and appreciate the complexity of what we are trying to achieve.

Nurturing the Narrative by Actions

Shifting the economic paradigm is not an easy task and sometimes it is good to take the time to appreciate the progress that has been made.

The Platform Co-op Movement is colliding with existing and emerging initiatives.

These include but are not limited to groups such as “Open Co-op”: an organization in the UK “building a world-wide community of individuals and organizations committed to the creation of a collaborative, sustainable economy”. The “Zebras Unite Movement” was started in Portland, and calls for a more ethical and inclusive movement to counter existing start-up and venture capital culture. In Paris, “Plateformes en Communs” is organizing recurrent meet-ups for Zebra startups. “Supermarkt” a platform for digital culture, collaborative economies and new forms of work in Berlin is also trying to structure the local PlatformCoop Movement. Another relevant?example relates to the sale of Twitter in 2016, Nathan Schneider suggested to transform it into a co-op. This idea got enough attention to be seriously discussed during the annual stakeholder meeting in May 2017.

Trebor Scholz got an important grant from the Google Foundation to support the economic development of cooperatives in the digital economy. Professor and author Jack Linchuan Qiu is strongly invested in gathering the existing PlatformCoop network in Hong Kong for their annual meet-up in an effort to get the asian coop sector and digital entrepreneurs on board.

The interest for the co-op model is also visible in the interest of academic institutions for the field. The VUB (Free University of Brussels) has started to study the benefits of the co-op model. The idea of platform cooperativism received enough traction to catch the attention of the Region of Brussels. The Region is currently funding a consortium of local experts in order to facilitate and encourage the emergence of platform co-ops. The consortium is composed of 3 organisations combining theoretical and practical skills; “Febecoop” is promoting and developing the cooperative model; “SAW B” a non profit enterprise is advocating for social entrepreneurship and “SMart” a shared enterprise of freelancers operating in 9 european countries that managed to scale its business model by developing a digital platform. The consortium is working hand in hand with “Coopcity” an incubator for social and cooperative entrepreneurship in an effort to create an appropriate environment to start a platform coop. Looking beyond the ambition of the Region of Brussels, the consortium will gather data on best practices from Berlin and Barcelona in an effort to strengthen and broaden existing networks.

The process initiated by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider will be slow but as long as we collectively continue to engage we will make change happen. It is important to encourage and nurture the existing mobilisation of policy makers, unions, entrepreneurs, academics, investors and consumers.

Embrace Patience and Appreciate Complexity

The challenges we are facing today are thrilling. We have at hand incredible technologies, brilliant thinkers and entrepreneurs which could enable us to shift our current world dynamic. This shift would contribute greatly to solving crucial global issues such as the urgent need to reverse the growth of social injustices. Collectively, we have an exceptional opportunity to work towards cultural change. We could move from an individualistic system that aims for personal profit, to a state of mind of solidarity.

To make these things happen, we hold an abounding ecosystem of social enterprises which can give insight on their know-how. Cooperatives have years of experience in managing distributed governance and social impact. We can also tremendously benefit from the unfortunate misconceptions of the current platform-economy as a handbook, which logs a full set of guidelines explaining what not to do and why.

Incorporating these positive and negative experiences can ensure that the tools we develop ensure the well-being of all the actors of the networks we create and bring about a positive impact on the environment in which they operate. In this way, we will be able to create the tools of tomorrow which central values will be social justice and genuine sharing.

Photo by belgianchocolate

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The Platform Co-op Development Kit is a multi-year project that advances the cooperative digital economy. The Kit is a project by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, homed at The New School in New York City, in collaboration with the Inclusive Design Research Centre at OCAD University in Toronto, and platform co-op communities worldwide.

The motivation behind this project is that we are approached, almost daily with the question of how to start a platform co-op. The work of the Kit is two-fold. First, we provide a range of resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. Second, we will offer tools not simply by building coop technology but technology that will allow the platform co-op ecosystem to grow. We started the co-design process by engaging five pilot platform co-ops in Brazil, Germany, Australia, the United States, and India. The pilot groups:

• 3,000 babysitters in Illinois organized by the Service Workers Union looking for an onboarding, labor, and purchasing platform;

• young urban women in Ahmedabad, India who are part of the SEWA Federation of co-ops bringing beauty services to people’s homes through an app;

• trash pickers currently operating in Sao Paolo and Recife, Brazil, whose work recycling trash makes up more than 90 percent of Brazil’s entire recycling capacity;

• refugee women in Germany, starting in Hamburg with Syrian, Albanian, and Iranian women, who plan to offer a platform co-op for child care services and elder care;

• homecare workers in Australia, the only worker co-op in social care in Australia, that is seeking to build a governance tool for its remote rural members.

All open source tools that we will design with these groups will be customizable for a range of platform co-ops in various sectors and countries.

Initiated with a $1,000,000 grant from Google.org, this project seeks to raise a total of $10,000,000.

By building a broad coalition, our team will engage people around the globe who are seeking to learn about and then build platform co-ops with their communities.

By working with pilot groups in various sectors — from home services, garbage-recycling and beauty services, to child and elder care — we will demonstrate how the cooperative approach plays out in the digital economy. We will work with co-ops, technologists, policy facilitators, researchers, and freelancers to advance the movement for a cooperative digital economy. Watch an video introduction about this work here.

Read the press releases about the Kit from the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, The New School, and OCAD University. Explore how this work connects with Google.org’s “Future of Work” Initiative here. Read media coverage about the project with recent articles from Fast Company (also discussing the question of accepting Google funding), Shareable, and Philanthropy News Digest.

Goals of the Kit

Over the next two years, with the support of the platform co-op community, we will develop open source tools for use worldwide; and provide various resources such as essential legal, intellectual, and entrepreneurial resources that make it easier to start a platform co-op. This work depends on collaborations with cooperators around the world coming together to support one another and advance this movement.

These goals will be met through the following deliverables:

• Creation of open source labor platforms and online governance tools through co-design processes with five pilot groups, tailored to be extensible and customizable for other platform co-ops with similar needs;

• Development of an online wikipedia-style learning commons, activated by informal as well as institutional online learning groups in several countries;

• Development of a curriculum about the cooperative digital economy to be distributed with undergraduate and graduate programs in business schools and law schools as well as acceleratorator programs;

• Creation of a data-rich, interactive map of platform co-ops, and supporting organizations and individuals;

• Development of an international network of lawyers to provide legal resources to assist the launch of (platform) co-ops;

• Development of a global narrative co-written by co-op workers, researchers, unionistas, technologists, and policymakers.

• Ongoing reports and analysis about work in progress made available to the public online, and regular calls for community engagement and input

Strategy for Achieving Goals

The design and development of the tools will be guided by the platform co-op communities themselves. Full cycles of co-design, prototyping, implementation & evaluation will ensure that the tools fulfill the needs of the community. Additionally, by working with diverse pilot organizations and populations, our team will provide essential assistance to platform coops of all stripes, and to workers with many socioeconomic backgrounds. This reverses the dominant pattern of platform development which typically excludes marginalized groups, contributing to greater economic and social inequities. The project places vulnerable and marginalized workers at the center.

Creating a supporting infrastructure for platform co-ops through a learning commons, interactive map, cooperative curriculum development, and legal resources will launch simultaneously with pilot group work. Website development will be lead by the IDRC team, and we continue to engage with a number of collaborators to generate the various components that will eventually make up the online ecosystem. To achieve both goals, time and resources will be split over the next two years, with 70% of efforts going towards the pilot groups, and 30% towards the projects’s online learning components.

Finally, the project will run as an open and transparent community. All resources and updates will be available online to any prospective or existing co-op, and all interested persons. Explore recent updates, for example, from the IDRC on the Kit and our work with the pilot groups thus far. And review our blog updates documenting recent visits with our Hamburg and SEWA pilot groups.

Through collaboration with pilot groups and by engaging individuals committed to the movement, the toolkit grows from small successes. As our work progresses, we will engage other cooperative ventures, organizations, and individuals who can contribute different resources and services to advance this critical project. Stay up to date on our work so that now or in the near future, we can draw on the expertise of the community and find ways of collaborating.

How We Will Measure Success

Grant activities started on July 1, 2018 and will conclude with Google on July 2020. Iterations of the deliverables and prototypes will be freely available and open to critique and input as our work advances. A broader measurement of the project’s impact, however, will not be available until completion.

We will consider the project a success if the Kit was implemented by low income workers in at least three pilot groups & successfully transferred to at least one other labor market. Success would be based on the evidence of higher wages, better working conditions, democratic governance within the enterprise, & potential for scaling this work to more workers. Due to the nature of this work, these metrics can only be measured upon the completion of the project. In the same way a highway’s efficacy cannot be measured while it is still under construction, so too can the pilot groups’ effects not be known until full completion and implementation.

During the project, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium will provide qualitative research investigations and progress reports on the pilot groups. Written reports will provide big-picture analysis, and highlight successes, failures, best practices, and other findings from the pilot groups. These reports will also discuss the feasibility of these models applying to other industries or regions, and when applicable, offer policy recommendations.

For strengthening the platform co-op economic movement and building an online infrastructure of support, we will fulfill these objectives:

• Engage a variety of unique platform co-ops in distinct countries to facilitate the scaling of our labor platform and distributed governance tools

•Establish active learning groups engaged with our content online in at various countries

• Deliver high profile talks and media publications about Kit work

• Create a global narrative co-written by stakeholders and make it available for translation in different languages.

• Create and distribute a curriculum to shared with business schools, law schools, undergraduate or graduate programs at universities.

• Develop policy briefs and engage different political parties to consider

• Develop and share platform co-op worker testimonials to be hosted online

• Generate traffic to the platform.coop website with blogs and a new site design

We will also use non-parametric methodologies of measurement so that we do not impose a particular notion of success onto groups that are marginalized and have already suffered from the effects of traditional “successful” interventions.

The outcomes of the Kit will be diverse and variable, but collectively the change will be significant. We hope to reach the most marginalized of platform workers and build our work from their perspective. To achieve this we need to look beyond predetermined measures of success. If we only concern ourselves with measuring success through quantitative metrics, then we would be forced to develop quick interventions that scale quickly. We would be merely recreating the platforms of the past that have contributed to existing economic and social inequities and further marginalization. That is a strategy of the exploitative, extractive companies we hope not to emulate.

Instead, the project will demonstrate that we have only scratched the surface of imagining the possibilities for the cooperative digital economy. While our work over the next two years can begin to address the urgent needs for more organized research and infrastructure to support platform co-ops, more importantly, it will lay the foundation for future researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, co-op workers, technologists, and many others to pick-up this work and carry it forward in new directions.

Please consider joining us in this critical work. We need the time and energy of many people for this work to succeed. If you think you can help, please write to us at [email protected] and we can share more on how to get involved.

The post ​Strengthening the Movement for a Cooperative Digital Economy Through The Platform Co-op Development Kit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

photo credit: Trebor Scholz

Last month, after a year of preliminary conversations, the team leading work on the Platform Co-op Development Kit launched a collaboration with the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) – the largest organization of informal workers anywhere in the world. SEWA, a union of 1.5 million members and a federation of cooperatives with over 300,000 members offering services such as child care and insurance, is headquartered in Ahmedabad but operates all across India, organizing poor women workers in the informal economy.

By partnering with our team as one of five pilot groups for the Kit, SEWA Federation will be able to co-design two projects. One will provide a democratic governance tool for the members of the co-ops that work under the SEWA umbrella but are geographically too far apart to meaningfully participate in its activities. The second project is a platform co-op for beauty services.

About Sewa

SEWA union launched in 1972 with a small group of women who wanted to secure micro-loans to start their own businesses. Having been told they were “not bankable” by the nationalized state banks at the time, founder Ela Bhatt helped them learn to launch their own bank. By pooling their resources, and with contributions as little as ten rupees from many women in the community, SEWA established its own cooperative bank in 1974 with 100,000 Indian Rupees, or slightly more than 1377 U.S. dollars. The women began to recognize their own power. Ela Bhatt’s first book was consequently titled “We Are Poor but So Many.” Next, the women turned their attention to reducing medical expenses, as they were proving to be an obstacle to the women paying back their loans. Within a few years SEWA created a healthcare cooperative, which now provides affordable medicine. More and more enterprises continued to develop under the cooperative model. And while SEWA focused first on organizing urban women, they eventually also expanded into rural areas.

Today, Sewa Federation is comprised of 106 cooperatives, working in industries such as milk production and financial services, prescription medications and garment manufacturing. Importantly, Sewa Federation is a multi-denominational enterprise with women from various religious backgrounds: Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jainist, and Buddhist. Sewa offers a range of services: from education to catering, childcare, and other services. The key to SEWA’s success has been its integrative approach, centering an entire ecosystem of co-ops around the needs of poor self-employed women in the informal economy. Learn more about SEWA’s unique approach through this report from the International Labor Organization (ILO).

We are grateful to the ILO for introducing us to SEWA.

Building A Beauty Services Platform Co-op

The collaboration with SEWA Federation is planned for the next two years. The platform co-op for beauty service will allow users to request a worker-owner to come to their home to do makeup, threading, waxing, and haircuts or massages. The platform will meet a growing demand for home services in the beauty sector in Ahmedabad and other Indian cities, as evidenced by the growth of extractive platforms such as UrbanClap and VLCC.

During his trip to SEWA to discuss this platform, Trebor Scholz met with both Namya Mahajan, managing director of SEWA Federation, and an initial cohort of 25 women who are currently being trained to work through the platform co-op. Learn more about the Federation’s commitment to the project in this short video with Namya:

When Trebor joined the workers in their first training session, they were learning how to greet a client at their home by stating their name, which was new to them as it is not common for low-caste women to state their names. Interestingly, many of the women already own or have access to smartphones. They are also familiar with Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram. But scheduling their work through a platform co-op will be new to them.

In discussing what they would like to see in the platform co-op, the young women emphasized their concerns about safety when traveling to clients and working in their private homes. In the workshop, the women asked for a panic button for workers to be integrated into the app. The button would allow them to quickly alert two friends and the police in case of an emergency. One of the more experienced beauty workers strongly felt that there should be no individual worker profiles available to customers. In order to protect the women from assault and harassment, users of the app should have no choice over which co-op member who is providing a particular service. They also expressed interest in a GPS feature that would allow a co-op manager to know their whereabouts.

By December of this year, once a prototype has been completed, work through the platform can begin with 25 women workers. A second group of 50 women will then begin the training, to join the platform in March 2019. The goal is to upscale the platform to anywhere between 500 and 1000, the average size of a SEWA cooperative. In contrast to the 30% of the revenue extracted from workers on traditional platforms, SEWA Federation only plans to take 15% to cover administrative and educational expenses. If successful, the platform co-op could even expand to cities like Patna, Chandigarh, and Delhi. Finally, because the women will be working in the clients’ homes, the platform could eventually offer other household services like cleaning, child care, painting, plumbing, electrical work, pet care, carpentry, cooking, and waste collection.

Additional support is coming from Godrej Consumer Products Limited. Godrej is contributing the initial capital investment for the business. It also supports the training for the beauty workers through curriculum.

Strengthening Distributed Co-op Governance

The second platform for SEWA will focus on organizing the cooperatives of the SEWA Federation spread out across the state of Gujarat, and additional cooperatives all across India. Distributed democratic governance is a significant challenge for many cooperatives, and given the number and diversity of co-ops within SEWA, and their geographic distribution across the entire state, SEWA needs a new online tool to help them organize, educate, and make decisions. Just think of the Adivasi women in the remote parts of the mountains in Southern Gujarat. While new tools like Enspiral’s Loomio saw amazing uptake, distributed democratic governance remains a big challenge for co-ops worldwide. But if trained to use technology and given smartphones, the women led by village elders could co-govern the co-op from afar. First conversations led us to imagine such functionality, also useable on flip phones, as follows:

• A decision-making tool in which co-ops can vote and decide on strategic matters and resource distribution within the federation

• A social-networking tool in which cooperators can connect and message each other

• An educational resources tool in which SEWA can share new videos, manuals, instructions, and best practices directly with co-ops, and co-ops too can share business information directly with the SEWA umbrella organization

These services, still pending the co-design process, would allow for improved business practices and stronger democratic governance for SEWA Federation across Gujarat. They could collect data from co-op members that could then be shared with policymakers, for instance. Thus, the tool could impact state policies so that local and national governmental policy better serves the interest of co-ops. The platform will also need to respond to the many different languages spoken by cooperators in the region (e.g. Gujarati, Hindi, English, etc.) and incorporate audio tools. In short, a new governance tool would dramatically improve the functionality and effectiveness of SEWA Federation.

More applied research in the area of distributed governance among precarious in the informal economy is much needed.

Sewa Federation is also interested in a cooperative online marketplace that would allow some of their co-ops to sell artisanal products, snacks, garments, generic medicine and Ayurvedic medicinal products.

In November, the Inclusive Design Research Center will start leading co-design sessions with women workers in Ahmedabad and then develop platform prototypes based on their specific needs. Trebor discussed with SEWA’s own video production cooperative the production of a series of testimonials documenting this process, interviewing workers in co-design sessions and creating videos in which women discuss their experiences with the platform co-op. Through the documentation of workers’ experiences, the videos will capture the potential of this model.

Learning from Sewa

The key to SEWA’s success has been their holistic, federated approach. SEWA places poor women workers in the informal economy at the center of an ecosystem of co-ops that seeks to address their various social needs, not just economic necessities.

In the U.S., many long-standing, very large and wealthy cooperatives have lost the focus on support for those who need it most. While large consumer, purchasing, and agricultural cooperatives like REI COOP, Ace Hardware, and Organic Valley prove economically successful and sustainable, they fail to significantly address broader social problems. They do not tackle complicated social and economic needs, like full-time workers lacking healthcare, rising income inequality, soaring childcare costs, etc. Workers in such co-ops sometimes do not exercise or feel inspired to participate in democratic governance.

By understanding and learning from SEWA, workers and cooperatives elsewhere can envision new ways of organizing their workplace, and re-orienting their cooperative identities. For example, larger U.S. cooperatives could commit to the 7 cooperative principles (especially the one focused on co-ops helping other co-ops), by investing in new startup projects (including platform co-ops) and creating spaces for incubation. They could also make a real commitment to open source tools, so that new platform co-ops do not have to waste resources and reinvent the wheel. By carrying SEWA’s integrated approach to the gig economy, we can imagine a stronger cooperative ecosystem that addresses the social and economic needs of workers in the informal economy, which account for over 90% of the Indian economy.

We are excited to be co-leading this work with SEWA over the next two years. As always, write to us if you would like to contribute ([email protected]).

For more information and the original post visit platform.coop

The post ​“We Are Poor but So Many”: Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and the Team of the Platform Co-op Development Kit appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Public trust in the investor-owned platform economy is collapsing. Business models based on selling workers and users to Wall Street are under growing scrutiny, and a small but growing number of cooperatively-owned platforms present a real, positive alternative. How might we seize this moment to show the promise of platform cooperativism?

We invite proposals for creative media interventions that communicate platform cooperativism. These might be 2 minute-long videos, comic books, memes, infographics, games, or more. They might seek to deepen the platform co-op community or draw new people into it.

To apply for funding, submit a proposal through this form by May 5. By May 15, two commissions will be selected for $1,000 in support each, of which they’ll receive $500 upon selection and $500 upon completion of the project as proposed (or amended with approval of the challenge coordinators), provided it is completed and deployed before July 1. Commissions, also, can expect support from the platform co-op community and its promotional resources.

This challenge is funded through royalties from the book Ours to Hack and to Own. It is jointly administered by the Platform Cooperativism Consortium and the Internet of Ownership. The coordinators are Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider.

artwork by James Seibold

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Trebor Scholz: It’s exhilarating to be here on the Canary Islands seeing this large group of people committing itself to building a more equitable future of work. I’m also thrilled to see so many young people and especially women. Today, I am bringing you greetings from the platform cooperativism movement. This event follows others in New York, Brussels, Boulder, Milan, Paris, to Toronto, London, and many other cities.(See videos and images of our last conference, The People’ Disruption, at The New School just two weeks ago).

The platform cooperativism movement intervenes at a moment of social crisis in the United States when ninety-four percent of jobs created over the past decade were not in the employment category. In 2016, over twelve million workers have made money on labor platforms. Much of that work is invisible with laborers often exploited, tucked away between algorithms. And over the long-term, as more labor markets shift to the Internet, it also matters that ownership of cloud services and social hangouts on the Internet is highly concentrated.

With two recent books, media campaigns like the #BuyTwitter inspired by Nathan Schneider, and the digital labor conferences that I convened since 2009 at The New School, we affected countless people. There have been innumerable newspaper articles and talks. Platform co-ops were launched, and there are now small platform cooperativism working groups in Berlin, Tokyo, and Melbourne. (Why not watch the two showcase sessions at The People’s Disruption: I and II?)

We must succeed in this endeavor because the workers need us to succeed. “We need us to succeed,” as Palak Shah put it at The People’s Disruption.

Over the next forty minutes, I would like first to give you a bit of context about the roots of platform cooperativism, introduce an example of platform co-ops, and lastly offer some reflections to contribute to your work, locally.

I.

While this is not only a story about the Internet, it starts in 1969 when the first four nodes of the Net were linked up. After three decades of relative income equality after WWII (especially when you were white), in 1972 wages of Americans workers started to stagnate if adjusted for inflation. In 1989, the Socialist republics imploded and many trade unions started to decline. At this point, capitalism lost its most fervent internal and external challengers. The World Wide Web had become a household name by 1995, but it really only caught on as a technology that was used for Internet-mediated labor in 2005. It was then that Amazon introduced its crowdsourcing platform, getting, as filmmaker Alex Rivera put it in his cult hit Sleep Dealer, “all the work without the worker.”

On the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, the sharing economy capitalized on the willingness of people to work for less and give up their rights associated with employment, as guaranteed under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Initially, however, a genuine sharing economy emerged, concerned with resource sharing and ecological devastation (think: Couchsurfing and Blablacar) but this was swiftly hijacked by the extractive logic of venture capital that forced such companies to turn on their turbo vacuum cleaners and extract value from communities. These platforms were like four-dimensional objects arriving in three-dimensional space. They swooshed past regulators like ghosts, and when these policymakers started to pay attention, the companies were already in their third product-cycle. Democracy is slow, but technologists on the ground move with warp speed. Extractive sharing economy startups mobilized the language of peer-to-peer discourses and intimacy. They appropriated the ideology of counterculture of the Sixties and instrumentalized the social capital of cooperatives to sell services through platforms.

Over the past forty years, as the French political scientist Thomas Piketty substantiated, income inequality has spiked. “Super managers” emerged with astronomical salaries while the bottom ninety percent had fewer and fewer life opportunities. Since 1972, the wages of American workers stagnated while their productivity, individually, steadily increased. Today, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet own more wealth than the poorest half of the United States combined.

Such extreme economic shifts also lead people to identify differently. They are looking for a way out. Some people turn to drugs (just consider the opioid epidemic in the U.S.), to activism or tech, or to building economic alternatives. Parts of the population turned to nationalism; they are radicalizing, becoming a threat to the project of democracy altogether. Cultural schisms became more pronounced as we’ve seen with Brexit where most Britons living outside urban centers and Scotland who opted to leave the European Union.

Income inequality was also a contributing factor when it comes to the rise of xenophobia and nationalism all across Europe and the United States. Just think of the thirteen percent of German voters who made the neo-fascist AFD the third strongest party in Germany.

Building on these problems, the technologies underlying the on-demand economy accelerate the emergence of a neo-feudalism, virtually a new servant culture that puts the bottom ninety percent into the service of the top ten percent.

Facing a social crisis like this, I support anything that makes the situation better for most people. As long as it serves that purpose, align yourself with whichever movement you want or follow whatever strategy or tactic: work with regulators, build alternatives, work with unions. Naturally, we see a broad alliance with cooperatives worldwide, the solidarity economy movement, the pro-commons movement, unions, and labor advocacy groups, policymakers, the employee ownership movement, the Open Source/Free Software movement, and the Creative Commons.

II.

“To outline a different model of consumption, is of a much more real and revolutionary significance than all the abstract speeches about the billions pocketed by monopolies and about the need to nationalize them.” (Gorz, 82)

In an article, written in 2014, I suggested to join the almost two-hundred-year-old economic model of cooperatives with the digital economy. Imagine an Uber owned by its drivers. I called this intellectual framework “platform cooperativism.” (Try to say that three times fast.) I think of it as the intellectual Northstar for an ethical on-demand economy, characterized by two core commitments:

1) The platform is owned by the workers or the workers alongside other people who have a stake in this platform. These might be users or consumers. This is about coming into economic power; it is about the move from the blueprints to actual economic power. You cannot substantially change what you do not own.

2) The platform is democratically governed which means that the people who depend on it most, have a say in what happens on it.Importantly, the idea is not to create a clone of the likes of Airbnb or Uber. It isn’t about creating replicas. But we do rip the algorithmic heart out of these platforms only to put in a different code based on our values: cooperative values.

Platform cooperatives are different in that they embed the seven cooperative principles in the design of platforms. I’ll explain this further when talking about UpandGo.coop. The organizational form of the cooperative is key for platforms if they want to support economic, digital self-defense and autonomy. It allows communities to make a living while also contributing to the greater good. The economic model of platform cooperativism has distinct advantages if compared to investor-based startups.

The importance of inclusive codesign has been one of the central insights for us. Codesign is the opposite of masculine Silicon Valley “waterfall model of software design,” which means that you build a platform and then reach out to potential users. We follow a more feminine approach to building platforms where the people who are meant to populate the platform are part of building it from the very first day. We also design for outliers: disabled people and other people on the margins who don’t fit into the cookie-cutter notions of software design of Silicon Valley.

Let’s talk about Up&Go

Take Up&Go.coop, for example, is an umbrella platform for various cooperatives, designed in New York. Up & Go connects users with professional house cleaning services provided by low-income immigrant women who are organized in local cooperatives. The platform is cooperatively owned and governed by the women who use it. As owners, they decide how they want to provide their services to clients. The low-income immigrant women who are working on Up & Go, are receiving ninety-five percent of the revenue of the platform. For now, Up & Go is able to dedicate no more than five percent of its revenues to operate the platform. What’s important to me about platform co-ops is that they are activating the negative spaces of Trumpism. They are a response to the market failures of the extractive sharing economy. To raise our ambitions, I invite cooperators to think about platform cooperativism as what 1970s French theorist André Gorz called “non-reformist reform.” It acknowledges that “all struggle for reform is not necessarily reformist.” (7) Gorz writes,”A non-reformist reform is determined not in terms of what can be, but what should be. It basis the possibility of attaining this objective on the implementation of fundamental political and economic changes.” (7-8)

Platform cooperatives are projects of transition on the way to a post-capitalist future. They are economic near-term alternatives that can provide the material sustenance that allows workers to build out these platforms as scaffolding on which to build a better future. In Strategy for Labor, Gorz writes

“Instead of dichotomizing the future and the present — future power and present impotence, like Good and Evil — what must be done is to bring the future into the present, to make power tangible now by means of actions which demonstrate to the workers their positive strength, their ability to measure themselves against the power of capital and to impose their will on it.” (11)

Up & Go demonstrates that positive strength of workers through design interventions, too. They differ in many ways. Up & Go refuses an individual reputation system for its workers, for example. In Silicon Valley, we are so used to the narrative of innovation that we often forget that the technological developments that we are describing as innovative are more focused on short-term profits for shareholders instead of sustaining businesses or community value for that matter. We need to build lasting generational wealth that impacts our communities.What was especially interesting talking to the developers and people involved in Up & Go is that the key challenge in the development was more social than not technical. It was about getting the various cooperatives to agree to work with this platform and to accept credit cards. It was important to look beyond day-to-day disagreements; this is about our project, and we will succeed together. Platform cooperativism is not only a political and economical intervention, but it is also a cultural project. This is not only about the fight for new organizational structures but it has to go to the root level. It’s about changing people’s mindsets.

Silicon Valley has its own culture. Platform cooperativism needs its own culture concerned with the necessary shift from the idea of the competitive super worker, the homo economicus who mows down the competition. Instead, this is about an image of us as cooperators who sometimes act out of self-interest but then, too, driven mutual aid and cooperation. A large part of our work is about the shaping of a counter-narrative. Currently, Up & Go’s workforce is small in numbers: just a few dozen women from three cooperatives, but I still think this example can tell us a lot about the potential of worker cooperatives in the platform economy. Worker cooperatives in the United States are few and far between. There are just four hundred of them in the U.S., and they haven’t created very many jobs. Governance and scaling are key challenges. People just can’t agree with one another. While worker cooperatives, in particular, seem to have hit a glass ceiling in the economy, they may be able to grow and have access to nontraditional sources of funding – crowdsourcing, ICOs, and other blockchain experiments. These were not available to traditional worker cooperatives previously, as labor scholar Juliet Schor pointed out at The People’s Disruption. Worker cooperatives have the potential to scale in the platform economy.

Up & Go can also launch us into a discussion about the economic impact of platform co-ops. People who are more inclined to support big capital than I am — like economist Tyler Cowen— dismiss cooperatives because their contribution to the GDP is too small. That’s a fair point. Economically at least, in the United States cooperatives are only a small part of the GDP. Despite the fact that one in three Americans is part of a cooperative, there are impactful cooperatives like ACE Hardware, REI COOP, Ocean Spray, Evergreen Coops, Cabot Cheese, and of course the Associated Press (AP), and internationally, Barcelona Soccer Club, closely followed by Mondragon in the Basque country. (Watch the talk by Jim Kennedy, senior vice president for strategy and corporate development at the AP, at The People’s Disruption).

But in day-to-day life, for most Americans, these cooperatives are hidden in plain sight. In part, the problem may be that these institutions do not project their values outward, or that the co-op is not always consequential when it comes to labor conditions (think: REI COOP is a consumer cooperative but its 12,000 employees are not members). If you study business, with very few exceptions, you will not learn about cooperatives in business schools in the United States. But Cowen is falling prey to what author Chip Ward calls the “tyranny of the quantifiable” (what can be measured almost always takes precedence over what cannot). Platform cooperatives and of course traditional cooperatives create benefits in many unmeasured ways, and it is exactly this peer value, the long-term value that is created for the community, the value that is created among refugees and immigrant populations and their families and relatives that needs to be accounted for, too.

The creeping spread of cyber-empire

The “frightful five” capture more than half of all Internet traffic. This extreme platform power of Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon irreparably tips over power asymmetries between users and platform owners, especially when we consider how their power will be amplified through the stack— the interlinkages between existing web services, AI, the Internet of Things, and smart cities, mobile apps, and cloud services. As the F.C.C. plans to repeal net neutrality, it is urgent to work on alternatives such as the cooperative cloud. MiData.coop, a Swiss platform co-op has plans to federate cooperative cloud storage to facilitate the sharing of health data between patients.

What does all of this mean for your practice?

I flew in here just a few hours ago from New York City. I will not pretend that I know anything about the Canary Islands, this territory off the shore of the Sahara. I do know, however, about Made in Canarias the project of Pablo’s team and the Glocal Network of Platform Cooperatives. There are significant agricultural and housing cooperatives and associations that intend to turn into co-ops. With 28.3%, unemployment here is even higher than on mainland Spain; 34% of women cannot find work. Only ten percent of your food supply is produced locally. Despite the fact that I just helicoptered in on the islands, I have three suggestions. “If you build it with them, they will stay.” As the saying goes, “If you will build it, they will come” but “If you build it with them, they will stay.” We should start by designing these platforms with all stakeholders involved starting on day one (e.g., designers, workers, prospective users, funders, policymakers). The person closest to the problem is the person most qualified to solve it.

Co-design

Inclusive co-design counters the masculine waterfall model of software design. It is agile and builds on small successes. Technology is a social process. There’s been so much excitement about blockchain technology and artificial intelligence and the opportunities of all of that. There is something extremely important about blockchain technologies. But looking at what blockchain can do right now, this still seems unclear. I don’t need to be a card-carrying blockchain believer to see that. And as I had shown with Up & Go, the social aspects matter at least as much as the technical in the platform co-op design process. “Production is a means and man is the end,” as André Gorz put it (18). Historically, this became also evident with the introduction of TCP/IP, the Internet protocol. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, the inventors of TCP/IP, had to go from institution to institution, from door-to-door, to convince people to use their protocol. Technology is a social process.

Creating ecosystems of mutual benefit

Next, think about the creation of ecosystems of mutual benefit. How can a food cooperative help local housing cooperatives? How can a union support the agricultural co-op and how a taxi co-op can create profits for an association of service workers? Have a look at Howard Brodsky’s project “Cooperatives for a Better World.” Beyond that, I would also highly recommend you to learn about SMart, which is a mutual risk cooperative now operating in nine European countries creating benefits for freelancers.

Contribute to the commons

My next advice is to wholeheartedly invest in the commons. With platform cooperatives you see those investments in the commons widely. Many platform co-ops share their code base on Github.

Focus on pull markets

Start in markets where no extensive marketing is necessary because clearly, it will be very difficult to compete with the war chest of the likes of Uber or Airbnb. Starting in markets where there is more demand than supply such as social healthcare and home health care will be of strategic importance. Millions of home healthcare workers worldwide will be needed over the next few decades, worldwide. Labor markets such as child care, home health care, food delivery, house cleaning, and data entry are shifting to the Internet where workers toil under conditions they do not choose for CEOs they cannot ouster. This is an area where the Platform Cooperativism Consortium in New York will focus most of its efforts going forward.

We need scholars and builders of platforms and culture

We need builders. We need pragmatic utopians. But we also need universities. I’m not suggesting that researchers will be able to determine which platform co-op models will succeed in a given country (I wish it’d be that easy). Scholars can, however, dig deep and trace the intellectual lineage of platform cooperativism. André Gorz is a good start. Second, it’s about ethnography and fieldwork. Third, it’s about organizational theory (i.e., analyzing governance issues). Practical case studies will be needed (what worked, what did not).

But none of that is enough.

We need to focus on sustaining the feeling of a shared project, holding on to our core commitments, while also allowing for diverse perspectives and different takes on what you can do with the platform co-op model— how i should be designed and how it can be used. As Jutta Trevanius said at People’s Disruption, “if you can keep [platform cooperativism] in that state of the impermanent, imperfect and incomplete, then that continually invites more people to help.”

We want participation. We want codesign. We want diverse practices.

The post Participation, codesign, diversity: Trebor Scholz on Platform Cooperativism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.”

Trebor Scholz interviews Julie Broad and Indigo Olivier. Originally published at Platform.coop.

Trebor Scholz: Julie, you just graduated from The New School. What was your experience?

Julie Broad: I transferred to The New School from McGill, a large research university. The New School is, of course, really different: small classes with engaged, dedicated professors who show care for the students.

Before I graduated in May, I started to get involved with the campaign to unionize our student academic workers, a fight that has been ongoing since 2014. I was working as a research assistant at the time for a really wonderful art history professor at Parsons. I started getting to know our graduate students — some of whom had been my instructors — and the kinds of issues they were facing as workers. I had often thought of The New School as really supportive and intimate compared to McGill’s kind of bureaucratic machinations, but then you start chatting to people about pay disparities, being overworked — and that image falls apart.

The movement for student worker unionization is challenging the way we think about the university. Research and teaching assistants are reasserting themselves — and, in some cases like ours, finally being recognized by the National Labor Relations Board — as workers with the right to have a say in the terms and conditions of their work. But you can only get so far when you don’t own the organization you work in. A cooperatively owned college could go a step further in the public conversation about economic equity. In collaboration with unions, a cooperative college could reshuffle how learning takes place in a way that makes it more affordable and fair to everyone involved.

Indigo Olivier: When I applied to The New School, my father was unemployed, my mother was supporting a family of four on a public school teacher’s salary, and I had a twin brother going to school at the same time as me. The New School did not give me nearly enough financial aid and campus jobs didn’t pay enough to support the cost of living in New York.

I was self-supported throughout my time as a student and set a strict schedule for myself to graduate in three years instead of four to minimize the amount of loans that I had to take out (about $32,000). Rushing through my college experience didn’t allow me to explore all the things that I wanted to explore and working a lot didn’t leave me any time to take up an internship or volunteer my time to social movements if they were off campus.

Going to the financial aid office, I very much got the feeling of being treated like a customer, not a student that’s part of a larger academic community. A co-op college could turn this understanding of what it means to be a student on its head.

TS: In 2012, I proposed a cooperatively operated college that would offer substantive education at drastically lower tuition fees, taught not at the university but in cafes, public libraries, museums, and parks. Do you think that a college operated based on co-op principles could work? What would your ideal college look like?

JB: Sure, I think that if we consider some of the problems with the educational system, cooperatives could be a radical alternative. There’s plenty to change. The magnitude of the student debt crisis alone is overwhelming. Students regularly tell themselves and each other that they just can’t conceptualize what it means to owe $37,000 (national average) by the time they’re twenty-one. Strike Debt and other movements working within the system are creative ways to alleviate a lot of people from crushing debt, but they don’t challenge the system. Students are stressed about their job prospects; educators are stressed about their job security, a lack of meaningful co-governance, and increasing administrative work. Who is this system working for?

An ideal university would be a lot of things, but firstly, I think it’d be a commitment to supporting students financially, so they’re working on research and projects instead of juggling four jobs. I remember a petition, I think spearheaded by students working with Get Artists Paid, going around at the beginning of the summer, asking folks to pressure the board of trustees to stop holding the transcripts of students (primarily students of color) who had unpaid balances. Like Indigo said, there are national and international movements for racial and economic justice that we need to support; addressing the extreme economic disparity happening within the walls of our university is where we should start.

IO: For one thing, in my ideal college, there would be no Board of Trustees. University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.

My ideal college would make servicing the wider community its ultimate concern. This means prioritizing research that confronts mass incarceration, climate change, the war in the Middle East, and the erosion of the middle class in a very practical way.

The university president would be elected for a limited number of years. For this position, students and faculty should be able to vote for a social justice leader, labor organizer, or artist; their vision for the university would, therefore, go beyond mere branding and new facilities.

TS: Indigo and Julie, thank you for sharing your experiences so openly. You are not alone. A few years ago, CUNY Professor Cathy Davidson, summed it up: “There is not a person -­‐ students, teachers, administrators -­‐ who believes that the current education system is working.” You’re right: How could students and all people working in universities: from janitors and cashiers to cooks, staff, adjuncts and all faculty be better served?

It’s not like people did not try before. Just think of the student occupations a few years ago, and the many do-it-yourself universities that emerged on the heels of the student protests of 1968. Remember the Free University Movement in Berkeley, Berlin, and many other cities or Mount Holyoke College launched as an experiment of a small consortium of colleges in Massachusetts. Today, there are countless non-accredited learning groups that capitalize on the possibilities that 21st-century networked technologies. There are many examples: Peer to Peer University, Florida Universitaria in Spain, University of the People, Edu Factory, Occupy University, The School for Poetic Computing (founded by a former Parsons professor), and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. While these learning collectives are very different in their approaches, most of them do not offer accreditation, and it really is that accreditation that matters to many prospective students.

In the midst of this watershed moment in higher education, what is necessary for positive institutional change is for administrators to provide incentives for innovation and experimentation of programming efforts. A cooperative college would have to be more than an engine of speculative idealism. While cooperatives have always been about bottom-up self-help and autonomy, it’d be important to consider if and how a cooperative college could function within a university that is not a co-op.

JB: I think the broader issue, which a co-op model might be able to address, is economic uncertainty. Who knows how our degrees will hold up when we graduate. A model that allows for more democratic, participatory structuring could free up students and educators to have not only more economic equity, but also take a larger part in controlling what we want to do with the university. A cooperative college could put more control into the hands of people whose futures are largely contingent upon their successes in academia. Such democratic control is the promise of any co-op: respect in and democratic control of the workplace. As the academic worker movement has brought renewed focus to the university as a site of worker exploitation, there’s a lot of room for dialogue about what democratic control could look like.

Giving students a literal stake in the university as owners could, I think, completely change the dynamics of on-campus organizing, whether labor or otherwise. Historically, there are many examples where the labor movement and cooperativism have gone hand-in-hand. Of course, Trebor, you know that these kind of alliances are already being made in the world of platform co-ops, with workers co-ops like Green Taxi in Denver being hugely supported by Communication Workers of America.

IO: We first have to recognize that schools are communities because I think most administration have all but forgotten this fact. The New School is there rhetorically, but in practice it’s an entirely different story. Since the recession, tuition at Eugene Lang The New School for Liberal Arts has gone up 47.6% while the endowment went up by 85.1% from 2010-2015 alone (New School Almanac, pg.140).

The current model of higher education is in crisis but we cannot separate this from the larger crisis of capitalism that has brought about the environmental crisis, the refugee crisis, a crisis of democracy, etc. The role of a cooperative college should be to provide the resources to make sense of these different intersecting crises and then act on them cooperatively with labor, environmental organizers, prison abolitionists, and urban communities outside of the university.

There is absolutely a better way to operate a university, and I don’t think there is any lack of imagination there: CUNY has been working on transforming the student senate to a participatory budgeting model, the Edu-factory collective reimagined the university as the 21st century “factory” where connecting the university to the city could create a new understanding of “the commons” (see: Towards a Global Autonomous University), and groups like the Debt Collective have created new networks that bridge student debtors with mortgage, auto, medical, and credit card debtors.

What is needed to sustain these organizations and projects is a vision that sees the transformation of the economy at large as its ultimate goal. To “fix” the “broken model” of our universities we need to “fix the economy” and vice versa. That means we need to take a global perspective when thinking about co-ops that doesn’t just include our students, faculty, and immediate communities, but also the communities across the world that are, for instance, on the receiving side of the research that our university has been conducting for the Department of Defense since 2002.

TS: I learned from my work with the economical and political movement around platform co-ops how important it is to collaborate with other social movements.

It is peculiar that while democracy has been propagated in many countries throughout the 20th century, it has largely skipped the workplace. Workplace democracy is hard to come by, also in universities. It’s worth exploring the question if the one-worker, one-vote model of co-ops would make sense for institutions of higher education. As you so convincingly point out, the current educational system in the United States does not work. It’s worth exploring if the cooperative model could work for higher learning. For one, co-ops could contribute their core intellectual commitments, anchored in the ICA’s seven co-op principles: 1. Voluntary and Open Membership 2. Democratic Member Control 3. Member Economic Participation 4. Autonomy and Independence 5. Education, Training and Information 6. Cooperation among Co-operatives 7. Concern for Community. What would it mean to apply these principles to a cooperative division of The New School? One place to start could be adult education, returning to the legacy of the 1940s when The New School was a center of continuing education in New York City.

IO: We can agree on certain principles, and I do believe democratic participation is fundamental to both sustaining a co-op university and preparing students for civic engagement after college. Additionally, there have been some interesting ideas proposed that need to be experimented with further: open source unionism, reinvesting endowments, participatory budgeting, and academic councils.

The Women’s Strike this past March was a great example of movements coming into the classroom and the classroom moving out onto the streets. We saw activists, artists, community organizers, and students interacting in ways that probably wouldn’t have occurred if we didn’t all feel this moment of panic with Trump’s election. What we need to do is follow through with “movement moments” and turn them into resilient networks.

TS: It takes practical utopians to imagine a cooperatively operated ‘Ivy League community college.’ What, for example, would be the key tenets of a manifesto of such a cooperatively operated college? It could, for example, be completely learner-administered with all expenses only focusing directly on learning. All members of the university could participate in its day-to-day operation, which would help to keep the costs down. Instructors would function as “learning sommeliers,” or learning coaches. Following Ranciere, professors would not only be in the classroom to impose what they know but rather, to bring out the knowledge that’s already there. Beyond that, the college could heavily rely on open educational resources and all research would be published freely accessible online.

Students could be socialized into non-extractive platforms; they could learn to use social.coop or instead of Twitter and Diaspora instead of Facebook.

Instead of the semester-structure, we could use flexible units that would last, depending on need, any time time from three days to two years. Each group of learners could have an intergenerational mix: pre-­college learners, middle- and high-schoolers, traditionally university-aged students, and retired professionals. There should also be a mix of online and in-person learning to create a continuous, learner-­centered experience that is not restricted to the classroom.

Such co-op college could also be a place to experiment with new models of accreditation such as Mozilla’s Open Badges.

IO: We do need to experiment with models of accreditation. However, without some push from labor in the workplace, I think it’s very likely that alternative forms of accreditation would be discriminated against. This goes back to the need for some larger cultural shift in how we think about learning versus schooling and which one holds more weight in the job market.

I think there is a danger of getting trapped in the “small is beautiful” mentality when we talk about cooperatives. A manifesto would have to take a national and international perspective to be truly transformative. It would have to simultaneously address the labor grievances of academic workers and the future conditions of students who will graduate and be “competing” for jobs with a global workforce that’s predicated on “free trade.”

The student movement of the 1960s understood this pretty well and tried to lay out an analysis of society at large, with “student power” as a means to a larger end. The goal of a co-op university should be replacing competition with cooperation as the ultimate virtue, and then eventually linking up with a larger socialist movement. With student debt fast approaching $1.5 trillion, universities will only help push students further down this path.

JB: This November, a working group of educators, students, and activists is convening in Manchester to parse out what a co-op university would actually look like. Creating a working theoretical model is important, sure, but they’re really after creating something which in practice can challenge the reigning, corporate model of higher ed, at least in the UK. Co-ops can grow and develop within capitalism — that’s the point. We can’t wait for a socialist revolution to get to a decent educational system. A cooperative university — or, to start even smaller, a co-op college within a university — which is academically rigorous, accredited, and democratically owned and governed, needs to prove itself. Let’s grab the market share, as it were, of equitable higher ed so that when socialist reform really starts making waves, we’re already there showing that alternatives are possible.

Julie Broad is a recent graduate from The New School, a writer, and an organizer with United Auto Workers, working on the campaign to unionize academic student workers on campus. | @thatbr0ad

Indigo Olivier is a recent graduate from The New School’s Global Studies program and a freelance journalist. | @IndigoOlivier

Trebor Scholz is a scholar-activist and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School. | @trebors

Image by Miquel Llonch via Stocksy United

The post ​Co-opting the University: Can the Cooperative Model Bring Economic Justice to the Ivory Tower? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” Link Mega-List

With November’s event come and gone, we have assembled a list of some of the articles and media resulting from “ Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet.” We want to thank everyone in attendance — in person and watching via live stream — for their dedication and passion. For those of you who did not get a chance to attend, we encourage you to check out the materials linked below which include post-conference write-ups, live coverage, image galleries, and archived recordings of every lecture given at the event.

Articles

• Writeup by Darren Sharp (@dasharp), including the launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
  
• Event highlights by Jonas Algers (@JonasAlgers)
• Enric Senabre (@esenabre) and Ricard Espelt (@ricardespelt) offer a summary of approaches to the design and development of platform cooperatives with a focus on the final day’s “unconference”
  
• Live coverage by Dorothy Howard (@DorothyR_Howard), reporting for e-Flux, with a host of links mentioned by different speakers
  
• Discussion of the conference and a collection of passages from important texts about platform cooperativism by Ewen Chardronnet (@ewenchardronnet) in English and French
  
• A published transcript of the talk by Wolfgang Kowalsky (@kokowo1) mounting a critique of platform capitalism
  
• The conference experience of Peter Bosmans (@febecoop), Febecoop, Belgium (Dutch)
  

Media

• All recorded footage, filmed by the Internet Society, can be found on the Internet Archive. You can also download a torrent file of all video files. These recordings also remain on the Internet Society’s Livestream channel where they were first broadcast.
  
• Collection of photos on Flickr
  
• Images posted to Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference
• Radio feature about the event by Deutschlandfunk produced by Patrick Stegemann (@petterich) (in German)
• All image tweets and text tweets made on Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference

Selected Presentations

Green Taxi

Jason Weiner of Colorado Cooperative Developers discusses the success of Green Taxi Cooperative, a new union taxicab cooperative in the Denver/Boulder metro area. The company’s app has the convenience and functionality of its venture-capital backed competitors, shares 100% ownership among its members, and is now the second largest worker cooperative in the country.

The Union-Coop Model

This panel, moderated by Trebor Scholz, featured speakers from a number of different unions: Palak Shah of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Dawn Gearhart of Teamsters Local 117, Lieza Dessein and Frisia Donders of SMart Coop, Annette Mühlberg of United Services Union in Berlin, Michael Peck of 1worker1vote.org and Mondragon, and Christian Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. They discussed the union-coop model and the challenges it will have to overcome to succeed.

Towards an Open Social Economy

In this talk, Yochai Benkler elaborates the economic conditions that have resulted in a crisis for democratic capitalism. Arguing that recent far-right populism is a response to an oligarchic capitalism which was born in the 1970s, Benkler claims that platform cooperatives have the potential to be a core component of an alternative, left-wing trajectory into a market economy re-embedded with social relations. He stresses the importance of winning an ideological war in this time of uncertainty, not on paper but through real-world organizations engaging in cooperative social production.

The Digital Democracy Manifesto

A cheeky and informative talk by Richard Barbrook discussing the path to the inclusion of platform cooperatives as a key point in the Digital Democracy Manifesto proposed by UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

MIDATA.coop

In his short presentation Ulrich Genicke introduced MIDATA.coop, a project that enables citizens to securely store, manage and control access to their personal data by helping them to establish and own national/regional not-for-profit MIDATA cooperatives. MIDATA’s initial focus will be on health related data since these are most sensitive and valuable for one’s personal health. MIDATA cooperatives act as the fiduciaries of their members’ data. As MIDATA members, citizens can visualize and analyze their personal data.

There were so many remarkable talks; these is merely a small selection. Here are a few more talks

• Thomas Doennebrink’s report from Berlin and Mexico City
• Nathan Schneider Interviews Professor Esther N. Gicheru
• Mayo Forell Fuster

The post Looking back on “Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” appeared first on P2P Foundation.