About SCC

Our project is a model of what a community-controlled broadband ISP could be in rural Appalachia and the South. We have built a working line-of-sight broadband tower at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, that will be able to deliver 1 Gbps speeds wirelessly to anyone in a 25 mile radius. A further two additional towers will connect communities in Cosby and the Clearfork Valley. These communities will establish member-owned cooperative franchise networks and community members will be trained in connecting and maintaining their own wireless networks.

This project will empower and inspire communities by proving that it is indeed very possible for them to have affordable, equitable, and reliable broadband access; and that they can even be their own Internet service providers!

Installing a home wireless system

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As we have painfully learned from the previous industrial and digital revolutions, technology is not entirely value-neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. Under the social and economic system of capitalism, most technological innovation has been driven by the desire to maximize profits, reduce space/time limitations (i.e. how long it takes to make and deliver a commodity or service), and eliminate labor costs. So, while it is true that the technology does not determine its own use (not yet anyway), its application and value have largely been determined by a small subset of humanity. We want to make sure that we change this equation with the Third Digital Revolution. How we structure the ownership, control, and use of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution will either aid humanity in our collective quest for liberation, or deepen still our species’ inhumanity towards itself and our dear mother earth. One thing is painfully clear, and that is if these technologies remain the exclusive property of the capitalist class and the transnational corporations they control, these tools will not be used for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of humanity, but to expand the profits and further consolidate the power of the 1% that rule the world. Under their control, these technologies will lead to a crisis of global unemployment on a scale unseen in human history. The end result will be a global dystopia, a social nightmare predicated on massive poverty, lawlessness, state repression, and ever greater human disposability rather than the potential utopia these technologies could potentially enable.

Confronting the Challenges: Class, Race, Gender, and Ecological Limitations

GYASI WILLIAMS (LEFT) AND AMALYA LIVINGSTON OF THE COMMUNITY PRODUCTION INITIATIVE.

In order to make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several glaring problems already in plain sight. Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and disenfranchised communities remain excluded. The same access gulf seen in the current “digital divide” is being replicated and deepened. Instead of a ubiquitous transformation, with equal access and distribution, what in fact is emerging is a “fabrication divide”.

This divide is layered, multi-dimensional, and compounded. The first and obvious barrier to access is cost. Those who can afford the machines will eventually be able to produce whatever they want, while those who can’t will remain dependent on the inequitable market, the forces that manipulate it, and the increasingly antiquated methods of production they employ to produce their consumer goods. While this revolution is spurred on by the dropping cost and rapid development of fabrication technology, indigenous and working-class Black and Latin-x populations will still find themselves at least a step behind as the cost of early adoption will continue to advantage the already privileged.

The issues of cost and accessibility lead directly to a discussion of class. The working class is almost always alienated from the market mechanisms that enable people to take the best advantage of emerging technology. Further still, the dismantling of society by the neoliberal project has eroded the bonds of social solidarity and eradicated the safety nets created through working-class political victories. The emergence of the Third Digital Revolution within this socio-political context will only widen the inequality and access gaps that already exist. For example, the recent elimination of net neutrality combined with years of starving public schools of funding and eviscerating city services ensures that libraries and any other public services that once helped to counterbalance the technological gaps experienced by the working class during the latter half of the 20th century are becoming ineffective or altogether nonexistent.

While there has been a great deal of public discussion about the advance of the Third Digital Revolution and what benefits and threats it potentially poses, there has been little discussion about racial inequity within the Third Digital Revolution. Without a major structural intervention, the Third Digital Revolution will only exacerbate the existing digital divide. Again, here the problem is layered and compounded, for the advances in automation and artificial intelligence that the Third Digital Revolution will advance will disproportionately eliminate many of the low-skill, low-wage manual labor and service sector jobs that historically oppressed communities have been forced into over the last several years. Given some projections of massive job loss due to automation, there is a real question about whether the potential benefits this transformation could have will outweigh the severe pain and loss Indigenous, Black and Latinx working-class populations will face as this technology advances.

Even less discussed than the class and race-based impacts of the Third Digital Revolution are the gender disparities that are likely to deepen if there is no major intervention in the social advance of this development. Despite recent advances, it is no secret that women are grossly under-represented in the technological and scientific arenas[2]. The question is, how can and will the gender inequities be addressed in the midst of the social transformations stimulated by the Third Digital Revolution? Will the existing gender distribution patterns remain, be exasperated, or will they be eliminated?

The Third Digital Revolution, like its predecessors, will undoubtedly make fundamental shifts not only to human society but to the planet as well, many of which have yet to be anticipated. One likely shift that must be examined is the potential of accelerated environmental catastrophe. Currently, 3D printing is all the rage, and for good reason. It inspires the imagination and hints at a future where we are able to download or create a file that will allow us to fabricate just about anything that we can imagine. The key question that hasn’t been asked is how will humanity manage personal fabrication on a mass scale? The earth’s resources are finite. Nevertheless, capitalism has ingrained in us an infinite desire for commodities. While the methods of production under capitalism have been horrifically destructive to the environment, there is no guarantee that the appetites that have been programmed into us over the last several hundred years will suddenly accommodate themselves to ecological balance and sustainability if we are suddenly given the ability to fabricate what we want in the privacy of our own homes. There is a great deal of consciousness-raising and re-socialization about our ecological limits and responsibilities, accompanied by major policy shifts, that must be done to prevent the resource depletion and massive fabrication waste that is likely to result from this technology becoming broadly adopted.

All of these challenging facets of the coming Third Digital Revolution must be addressed, and quickly. The Third Digital Revolution is emerging in a society with immense inequality and imbalance with regard to the integration of existing technology from the previous Industrial and Digital Revolutions. As these historic developments converge into the Third Digital Revolution, the concern is that not only will this inherited inequity continue but will be drastically deepened for all of the reasons listed above. Those of us seeking to realize the potential of the Third Digital Revolution to help our species realize its full potential, must create the means to combat this deepening inequity, and democratize this transformation. If we can do that, we may very well be able to lay the foundation for a democratic and regenerative economic order, one that could potentially eliminate the extractive, exploitative, and utterly oppressive and undemocratic system that we are currently subjected to.

Those who seek to assist in democratizing the technology of the Third Digital Revolution must understand that any initial investment at this time is risky. The road ahead is not clear. What we do know is that we cannot afford to leave the development of this technological revolution solely up to actors like Amazon, Google, Walmart, or the US Department of Defense. In their hands, it will only serve to further extract profits from the majority of humanity and maintain the imperial dominance of the US government through force of arms. However, finding capital players willing to make “non-extractive” investments that center on tech justice, cooperative business innovation, and production driven to fulfill human need over profit realization are hard to find. There are many organizations experimenting with getting this technology out to vulnerable populations to aid us from falling further behind the technological access gap, but none of us really know what will work initially, nor when the technology will be at a significantly advanced stage to truly replace the existing mode of production. The stakes are high, as are the risks at this stage. Nevertheless, we must struggle, as all early adopters should, to not only avoid being left out in the cold but to help guide the development in a democratic and egalitarian manner.

Creating the Future, Taking Risks, Co-Constructing Solutions

Early adopter risk-taking is exactly what Cooperation Jackson is embarking upon with the launch of our Community Production Center and Community Production Cooperative[3]. Our aim is to make Jackson, Mississippi the “city of the future”, a Transition City anchored in part in the practices of a “Fab City”[4] that would transform our city into an international center of advanced, sustainable manufacturing utilizing 3D printing and other innovative tools of the Third Digital Revolution. The only way we are going to come anywhere close to attaining anything like the utopia these technologies promise is by democratizing them and subjecting them to social use and production for the benefit of all, rather than the control and appropriation by the few.

The democratization of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution, both in their ownership and use, is one of the primary aims of Cooperation Jackson. To realize this aim we struggle for Tech Democracy[5] and Tech Justice first and foremost by educating our members and the general public about the promises and perils of the technology so that people can make informed decisions. We suggest this as a general framework of struggle. The next course of action we suggest is the pursuit of self-finance to acquire as much of this technology as we can, with the explicit intention of controlling these means of production and utilizing them for the direct benefit of our organization and our community.

Another course of action we suggest and are embarking upon is organizing our community for political and economic power to expand and reinforce our Community Production efforts. Our aim is to gradually make Community Production ubiquitous in our community, with the explicit intent of gradually replacing the exploitative and environmentally destructive methods of production in use at present. A related course of action is to utilize our political power to make demands on the government, the capitalist class, and the transnational corporations to remove the controls they have on the technology, like exclusive patents, in order to make these technologies publicly accessible. Another essential demand on the government is to make massive investments in these technologies to make them public utilities and/or commons[6]and to ensure that the corporations make restorative investments in these utilities for the public good.

We also think that public/community partnerships should be pursued on a municipal level to establish direct community ownership over these technologies to help ensure that vulnerable populations and historically oppressed communities gain direct access, with the prerequisite being where these communities are sufficiently organized and possess a degree of political power within the municipality. Public/community partnerships could also be essential towards capitalizing these democratic pursuits, by enabling the community to use both its tax wealth and various vehicles of self-finance to build out the necessary infrastructure in a manner that will ensure that it remains in the community commons or public domain. It is essential that these types of pursuits be public/community partnerships, with the community being organized in collective institutions like cooperatives, credit unions, community development corporations, etc., and not your typical public/private partnerships that will only remove this infrastructure from the commons or public domain as soon as possible in our neoliberal dominated world.

Further, given the steady decline in union membership, density, and overall social and political power, coupled with the ever-growing threats of automation, mechanization, big data, and artificial intelligence to the working class as a whole, we want to appeal to the various unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, as the most organized sector of the working class in the US, to take the challenges of the Third Digital Revolution head on. In fact, we think organized labor should be leading the charge on the question of Community Production, as it is in the best position given its resources, skills and strategic location in society to steer the Third Digital Revolution in a democratic manner. In this vein, we want to encourage organized labor to utilize the tremendous investment resources it has at its disposal to start creating or investing in Community Production Cooperatives throughout the US to further the ubiquitous development and utilization of the technology to help us all realize the benefits of a “zero-marginal-cost society”[7] to combat climate change and eliminate the exploitation of the working class and the lingering social and material effects of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, etc. It is time for the cooperative and union movements, as vehicles of working-class self-organization, to reunite again, and Community Production units could and should be a strategic means towards this end.

Finally, we have to keep pushing forward-thinking universities, particularly public colleges and universities, and philanthropists to also provide support to community production development efforts seeking to democratize control of this technology early on.

These are the core elements of what we think is a transformative program to utilize and participate in the development of the Third Digital Revolution for the benefit of our community and the liberation of the working class and all of humanity. We want and encourage other historically oppressed communities throughout the United States to follow this path, Jackson cannot and should not follow this path alone.

Supporting Cooperation Jackson and the Center for Community Production

If you agree with this analysis, in whole or in part, we need your help to bridge the Fabrication Divide. Cooperation Jackson is seeking broad public support for the development of our Community Production Center. We are aiming to raise $600,000 to complete the purchase of the facilities, build out them out, and equip them with all the utilities and equipment needed to create a dynamic Production Center. You can help build the Center for Community Production by becoming a National Donor or Investor and recruiting others to do the same. The $600,000 figure does not have to be daunting, if we can recruit 600 people to donate and/or invest $1,000 each, we can easily meet this goal. So, let us not be swayed, but moved to organize to turn this vision into a transformative reality.

[1] We draw our primary definition of the Third Digital Revolution from the work of Neil Gershenfeld, particularly his more recent work “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”, co-written with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.

[2] For more detail on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields see, “Women still underrepresented in the STEM Fields”, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/21/women-still-underrepresented-in-stem-fields.

[3] We derive our notion of Community Production from Blair Evans and INCITE FOCUS based in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see INCITE FOCUS https://www.incite-focus.org/ and “Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the Language of Nature” http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx.

[4] Fab City is a concept that grew out of the Fab Lab Network. For more information on this concept and emerging network see http://fab.city/about/.

[5] We are adopting the concept of Tech Justice from LabGov, which describes itself as the “laboratory for the governance of the city as a commons”. For more information see http://www.labgov.it/.

[6] We utilize the notion and definition of the Commons utilized within the Peer 2 Peer Network. For more details see “What it the Commons Transition?” at https://primer.commonstransition.org/1-short-articles/1-1-what-is-a-commons-transition.

[7] We have adopted the notion of a “Zero-Marginal Cost Society” from Jeremy Rifkin and his work, “The Zero-Marginal Cost Society: the Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”.

The post Countering the Fabrication Divide: The Third Digital Revolution and Class, Race, Gender and Ecological Limitations appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Kevin Stark: The word Decidim translated from Catalan means we decide, and it’s the name of Barcelona’s digital infrastructure for participatory democracy. One part functional database and one part political statement, organizers say Decidim is key to a broad digital transformation that is taking place in Barcelona — its institutions, markets, and economy. Organized by the Barcelona City Council, Barcelona’s citizens participate in a new digital commons, and its organizers hope that technology can improve democratic participation and foster good government. The open-source platform allows the public to participate directly in government as they would a form of social media, and they have had early success. The city council hosted several organizing events to decide on a strategic plan, and nearly 40,000 people and 1,500 organizations contributed 10,000 suggestions.

Decidim was born when a young protest movement in Spain swept into power, according to Xabier Barandiaran, a project leader, who compares the fledgling political party to the Occupy movement in the U.S. Its leadership’s first goal was to create a platform for open strategic planning for the city. “People were in the streets and saying let’s participate in democracy, let’s write a strategic plan,” Barandiaran said.

What developed was an open-source software that embodied the group’s transformation plan, a digital common where citizens can have a say in government — the code is available on Github. “We decided how we would decide,” he said. The leadership is still hosting public meetings once a month as well as large conferences — the next one is on October 26-28. I spoke with Barandiaran about Decidim and its origins. Here’s an excerpt from our conversation.

Kevin Stark: What was the context in which Decidim was born?

Xabier Barandiaran: It started in Barcelona and Madrid because there was a change of government that resulted from the indignados movement [sometimes called the 15-M Movement or anti-austerity movement], which was connected to the Occupy movement in the U.S. — for your American readers to make a connection. The political movement became a political party and then institutionalized. There was a change in politics that was motivated by a change in society and its mindset, and on the demands of the people.

It was really targeted towards politicians. And among these demands, perhaps, the most important one was to open-up democracy. Not to let it in the hands of the political parties and the establishment. So, once these new political parties or movements went into power in different cities in Spain — particularly Barcelona and Madrid — one of the earliest projects was to enhance all the means for participatory democracy, including the potential of technology to speed up and make possible a more complex participation.

I live in the city of Chicago. In my neighborhood, we have participatory budgeting — once a year my neighbors gather to decide what roads will be paved, street lights installed, or where we want to paint a mural. What is the Decidim vision of participatory democracy? What sort of change is made possible through the digital platform?

Budgeting is one part of participatory democracy but there are many others. Decidim makes possible almost all of them. It is only limited right now because we are still developing the software and new features are coming out every week. We have learned a lot. We have gathered collective intelligence from different expert citizens. All hackers, public servants, academics, people interested in their government. We run workshops and open citizen meetings. We came out with a wider spectrum of possibilities for participatory democracy, other than participatory budgeting. There are budgeting pilots in Barcelona. But we did not put all our eggs in that basket. We felt it was more important to identify the problems, to bring people together to speak about public services.

Everybody understands the potential of social networks. Often for silly things. Mostly for kittens and fancy photos and things. The potential for open knowledge like Wikipedia, or information spreading like Twitter, or intense relationships like Facebook, also applies to politics. But it does so with high controversy (post-truth, lack of privacy, democratic deficit, no-transparency, etc.). With Decidim we talk about a new generation of political networks that are oriented to decision making, commitment, and accountability. This new generation of social or political networks has to be open source, guarantee personal privacy and public transparency, sovereignty of the infrastructures, independence from private corporations and they have to enforce, by design, digital rights and equity. This is what Decidim provides.

Decidim is open-source software. But that’s not the only way the software is democratic. Decisions about the software are made democratically — it was built democratically. But there must be barriers for people who don’t have access or technological experience. How do you address that?

This is a very common worry. But the digital divide is no bigger than other barriers or gaps. Like the precariousness gap — people don’t have time to show up to a meeting, or they are have to combine different low paid jobs and are too busy to participate. The cultural gap, people need sufficient information and knowledge so that people can think of better policies. Or the gender gap — women are excluded from public participation. There are many gaps and the digital gap is the smallest of all the gaps.

It turns out that, with Decidim platform, we can close or reduce the impact of some of the other gaps (improve available information, flexible participation, gender imbalances, etc.). This being said, we take the digital divide very seriously and we have two programs that are important to us. One is the digital mediation program that we are launching soon so that citizens can get direct help at any library or civic centers to access the platform. We also have a training program. We have run some pilots, and we will have training workshops throughout the city next year to train and empower people of the potential of digital technologies for self-organization, democratic participation, data privacy protection, and digital rights.

There’s a video circulating online of you discussing Decidim in which you say that representative democracy is in crisis and “the political system that hasn’t changed in 200 years. Youth were living in a precarious situation and change had to happen.” What was the experience of being a young person in Barcelona and how Decidim is addressing issues?

We suffered (and we are still suffering) an economic crisis, but it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a political crisis. It was easy to see that it was coming. There was a lot of speculation of housing, and a very suspicious collaboration between political parties and the banks. Many of us could see it coming. It was going to explode. There was a big gap between the rich and the poor and that could only be filled with debt, but debt has a limit. There are physical limits in terms of time (you can’t pay a mortgage for more than 50 years) and the kind of jobs that were created where far from sustainable. It is regular people who paid for the foreseeable catastrophe and the existing democracy did not protect their basic rights. It was a failure of democracy altogether.

Hundreds of thousands of people joined the 15M protests all across the country, we had very specific demands and proposals to change politics, economy and society but the government failed to listen and to open the doors to public participation against the crisis. There was a generational change challenging the establishment and no means to channel the transition. There is a serious structural problem behind. Voting every four years is clearly not enough.

Democracy needs an update 200 years after its original design during the French Revolution. Moreover, while socio-technical innovations are disrupting our societies continuously (AirBnB rising the housing prices even higher, Google delivering free-of-charge services in exchange of our privacy, etc.), public institutions and political democracy was being left behind, creating an even greater democratic deficit on our societies. This is the situation that Decidim is progressively changing. This is what is new in Barcelona (and other cities like Madrid, Zaragoza, a Corunha): People can channel their collective intelligence into public administration, policy making and politics, We can propose, decide and monitor public policies with flexibility, with a fluid online-offline interaction, from our mobiles or from our neighborhood meeting.

But there is more to this story on the global landscape. We inherited the legacy of the Smart City. Barcelona hosts the Smart City Expo and it is ranked among the three smartest cities in different international rankings. We found a profound weakness of democracy and public institutions on this project: big tech corporations are taking city data and shaping our city life with private algorithms. This is a form of algorithmic governance that was progressively capturing the public sphere. There are two fundamental problems with this.

First, people, not machines, know much better how to solve their daily life problems, the only unsolved problem is to coordinate the potential of the collective intelligence of 1.5 million people. Second, a smart device can optimize a solution, but cannot define what is a problem to be solved, or fix the goal. The vision of our city is not something a machine or a corporation can do, it is something we need to build democratically. Decidim, as a platform for collective intelligence, is here to challenge this legacy and solve these problems, to show that democracy is smart. And we are doing so with the people, designing, testing and programming the software in an open and collaborative manner. We use Decidim to design Decidim. We call this community process MetaDecidim, and everybody is welcome to join and share.

This Q&A was updated on Sept. 6, 2017, with clarifications from Xabier Barandiaran.

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Phil Carey: We live in a world that needs to accommodate an extra 3 billion people within 50 years. We also have a population that is ageing globally, and here in the U.K., the number of people aged 65+ is projected to rise by nearly 50% (48.7%) in the next 17 years to over 16 million.

These two factors means that there will not be the manpower or financial resources to cope with this demographic shift unless we start to do something about it now.

The purpose of the session was to highlight the facts, issues and opportunities that an ageing population poses and to offer a ‘call to action’ as to why all generations need to start to work collaboratively in order to build a sustainable ‘ageless’ future.

The session started with the image above, to reinforce the message that we need to establish the vision, the passengers and the journey before we start to go into the details of platforms and collaboration. We explored the definitions of perspectives and values within the different generations and the hash facts and implications of the ‘age tsunami’ on the UK and the rest of the world.

Some of these can be seen on the session’s slides.

The session was then opened up to get feedback on what the group heard saw and felt, and to get the group’s view on what areas they felt were potential subjects to begin this collaboration process. Two categories did emerge – they were a future vision for an ‘ageless housing solution’, and creating a collaborative ageless asset image.

There was not enough time to discuss ‘platforms’, but the issue of how to prevent the digital divide becoming an issue between the different generations did get raised several times.

A animated video was subsequently produced to help summarise the session, and to reinforce the call to action.

About Philip Carey -Views and Shoes ltd.
Philip is conducting personal projects that focus on seeing the world from another perspective. They all focus on finding new ways of communicating complexity and difference visually and simply in order to improve communication and to define a common vision.

He has a personal interest in the looking at new ways of living in an ageing society, and the desire to make it sustainable by the time he gets there – but realises that not enough is being done to make this a reality.

He is currently looking at new ways to communicate London visually see www.londonruns.com.

Photo by Spyros Papaspyropoulos

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Indonesia is one of the world’s hottest and fastest growing digital markets. “With around 90 million Internet users and more than 281 million active mobile phone subscriptions, we can anticipate the development of the digital ecosystem in Indonesia that will lead the growth,” Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo wrote in “Strategic Review: The Indonesian Journal of Leadership, Policy and World Affairs” last year. “E-commerce has been one of the vital driving forces of Indonesia’s digital economy.”

Unfortunately, this growth has been uneven, and not all Indonesians have access to this burgeoning digital economy. Although it’s improving, only a little more than half of Indonesia’s population has regular internet access, and outside major cities, broadband access is severely limited. Smartphones — the most common method for accessing the internet in Indonesia — are almost all either manufactured abroad or domestically by international companies.

Koperasi Digital Indonesia Mandiri (KDIM), a cooperative based in the country’s capital, Jakarta, is trying to bridge this digital divide. It’s developing a locally-produced, low-end smartphone for Indonesians left out of the digital boom. It’s also building a platform for users to access services from other cooperatives on their phones.

“Unlike commercially distributed phones, this smartphone can only be obtained by becoming a member of the cooperative via its website, after which one needs to pay Rp 100,000 (US $7.48) per month for one year,” The Jakarta Post reported.

The phone had its soft-launch in late March, and will be available for all members in the coming months. We spoke with Adie Marzuki, chair of KDIM, to learn about how the organization uses the cooperative model to bring digital technologies and services to underserved Indonesians.

Can you tell us about how KDIM started, and why you decided to form a cooperative rather than a regular, for-profit company?

KDIM was initiated by two organizations, APJII [Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association] and MASTEL [Telematics Society]. We believe that we need to build inclusive economy for Indonesia. We have a very huge market here — more than 80 million smartphones users in the [Indonesian] market right now. But we still we have 60 million of our population un-served — this means that 60 million people in Indonesia have never had a smartphone. That’s why we need to have a domestic smartphone industry that serves the underserved in Indonesia — and that’s why we are creating an entry-level smartphone. They are not served by the current industry right now.

photo courtesy of KDIM

For that, the model of a cooperative makes the most sense. It is a fundamental economic system in Indonesia. We have the power of population, that’s why we built KDIM as part of an inclusive economy, so that we can leverage our numbers.

We don’t have power of capital — but we have power of the people.

What are your operating costs? How did you raise the capital to start the cooperative?

Our operating costs covered by collecting membership share from members. Membership share is a term used to refer to the contribution required for a person to become a member of the cooperative. The initial funding/equity capital [was] provided by the founding members, which consists of KDIM members of APJII and MASTEL.

Indonesia has many cooperatives. Can you tell us how you are similar, and different, from other cooperatives in the country?

We are the first Indonesian digital cooperative. There are other efforts to support the un-served people, but they are not in the digital industry — we thought that now, we need to engage all the population to emerge in the digital life, and benefit from it.

We created KDIM based on our own formulation — this is a completely new model for Indonesia. Other cooperatives in Indonesia are all in conventional businesses. We want to work with them, and we are asking the other cooperatives to follow in our way, and we are ready to serve them and give them the platform they need.

We are not trying to make our cooperative the biggest cooperative — we are offering the other cooperatives to use our platform to benefit and go to the digital era.

Once consumers become members of the cooperative, do they have to remain involved in the cooperative for as long as they’re using the phone? What do your members gain besides the phone itself, and how are they involved in KDIM?

Our members will use the phone itself as their membership tool. Members will benefit from the use of the phone as we have digital advertising system embedded in the platform. Members also gain points when they use the apps in the phone e.g. digital transaction, purchasing, and other digital activities, which are provided by the KDIM phone. Their points will be reflected in annual closing book, and members will redeem their points in rupiahs. In our annual meeting, each member will have one vote.

What’s your current membership base, and what are your medium-to-long-term goals? What kind of impact would you like KPIM to have on the country’s technology sector?

Currently we have 25,000 members. Of those, 5,000 of are directly, KDIM members, and the rest are from other cooperatives. Our medium-term goals are to invite lots of other cooperatives to benefit from our platform, while still allowing them to use their own cooperative brand. We will give white label B2B services to other cooperatives while we also inviting more members to join. Our long-term goal is to have our own digital industry ecosystem, which will serve all the 49 percent digitally un-served sector of society.

We are hoping our business model will inspire other tech players to be more inclusive and eventually close Indonesian digital divide. We haven’t officially launched yet, and we are aiming for an official launch of our phone in May, probably before the start of Ramadan.

Photo by AdamCohn

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