platform co-op development kit – P2P Foundation https://blog.p2pfoundation.net Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Mon, 07 Jan 2019 17:26:29 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 62076519 2018 and Onward: Where we are at with Platform Cooperativism https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/2018-and-onward-where-we-are-at-with-platform-cooperativism/2019/01/08 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/2018-and-onward-where-we-are-at-with-platform-cooperativism/2019/01/08#respond Tue, 08 Jan 2019 10:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=73933 By Trebor Scholz. Originally published in Platform.Coop 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... Continue reading

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By Trebor Scholz. Originally published in Platform.Coop

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 usersElizabeth 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 KagelMicky 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

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​Strengthening the Movement for a Cooperative Digital Economy Through The Platform Co-op Development Kit https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/%e2%80%8bstrengthening-the-movement-for-a-cooperative-digital-economy-through-the-platform-co-op-development-kit/2018/09/18 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/%e2%80%8bstrengthening-the-movement-for-a-cooperative-digital-economy-through-the-platform-co-op-development-kit/2018/09/18#respond Tue, 18 Sep 2018 08:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=72649 What is the Kit? 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... Continue reading

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What is the Kit?

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.

 

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​“We Are Poor but So Many”: Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and the Team of the Platform Co-op Development Kit https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/%e2%80%8bwe-are-poor-but-so-many-self-employed-womens-association-of-india-and-the-team-of-the-platform-co-op-development-kit/2018/09/13 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/%e2%80%8bwe-are-poor-but-so-many-self-employed-womens-association-of-india-and-the-team-of-the-platform-co-op-development-kit/2018/09/13#comments Thu, 13 Sep 2018 09:00:00 +0000 https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=72657 ​“We Are Poor but So Many”: Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and the Team of the Platform Co-op Development Kit Co-Design Two Projects 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... Continue reading

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​“We Are Poor but So Many”: Self-Employed Women’s Association of India and the Team of the Platform Co-op Development Kit Co-Design Two Projects

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.

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