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

The post Stop chasing unicorns: the power of zebras, herds and Platform Coops appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens: Dear Nathan, this is not your first book. Could you give our readers a short overview of your “life in books”, i.e. how each subsequent book is linked to the other, eventually leading to the insights and motivations that resulted in your new book on the future of the cooperative tradition ?

Nathan Schneider: It does seem like a rather baffling path. First, a book on arguments about God, then a close-up on Occupy Wall Street, and now co-ops. But it all makes sense in my head somehow. The overriding challenge for me has always been that of capturing how people bring their highest ambitions into the realities of the world. I’m drawn to people with both adventuresome imaginations and the audacity to put them into practice.

This book followed especially naturally from the Occupy one, Thank You, Anarchy. After the protests died down in 2012 and 2013, I started noticing that some of the activists I’d been following got involved in cooperative businesses. The first business I know of that started at Occupy Wall Street was a worker co-op print shop. Other people were helping create co-ops in areas of New York hit by Hurricane Sandy. There was this euphoria about the idea of co-ops among many of these people—a way of earning a livelihood while retaining the democratic values of the protests. I experienced a bit of that euphoria myself, which turned to a more serious fascination as I realized how long and deep this cooperative tradition has been.

MB: Can you tell us about the evolution of your engagement with Platform Cooperativism?

NS: Pretty early on in this work, I started seeing opportunities for cooperatives in tech. I’ve long been a tinkerer with free software and open source, so I’d been used to thinking of technology as a kind of commons. But this came to a head around 2014, when more and more people were wising up to the fact that Silicon Valley’s so-called “sharing economy”—which was then becoming mainstream—really didn’t have much to do with sharing. Especially under the guidance of the OuiShare network based in Paris, Neal Gorenflo of Shareable, and of course the P2P Foundation, I started noticing that a few entrepreneur-activists were trying to figure out a real sharing economy, with sharing built into the companies themselves. This was a hack open-source software was missing; those people had hacked intellectual property law but they’d left the extractive, investor-controlled corporation unscathed. Now it was time to rethink the logic of companies, and the old cooperative tradition seemed like a sensible place to start.

In late 2014 I teamed up with Trebor Scholz, who had been thinking along similar lines, and the following year we organized the first platform co-op conference at the New School in New York. The response was way beyond what we had expected, and we had the germ of a movement in our midst. The more I was getting approached by new startups trying to create platform co-ops, the more I found myself turning to history in order to be able to offer advice based on some kind of evidence. The more I did that, the more I discovered how much there is to learn and to draw from.

MB: How do you see the relations between cooperativism and the commons? Could they possibly merge?

NS: I regard cooperatives as a kind of commons, a mode of commoning that has made itself legible to the industrial-era state and market. Compared to the visions of many commons activists today, however, the co-op tradition is quite conservative. I like its conservatism; it makes for fewer wheels in need of simultaneous reinvention. As a storyteller, I find it can be hard to tell stories about the more cutting-edge commoners because the challenges they are taking on are so hard, and so new, that people who lack an ideological commitment aren’t going to stick around for long. Cooperatives are a way of introducing people to a radical vision of the commons that also includes familiar stuff like Visa, Associated Press, and the credit union down the street. But I wouldn’t claim cooperatives are sufficient. They’re a starting point, a gateway to more diverse and widespread commoning.

Another concern: Cooperatives are all about old-fashioned property and ownership. I’m sympathetic to the “property is theft” vein of anarchism, but I also think it’s a mistake for commoners to relinquish ownership before the lords do—as the sharing economy proposed. That’s feudalism. Open-source software developers relinquished ownership over the code for Linux, and now it powers history’s most effective corporate surveillance tool, the Android operating system. As Piketty demonstrates, capital ownership (more than wage income) is the driving force behind economic inequality. The cooperative tradition is a way of distributing ownership more equitably. That will put us in a better position to shift toward a world in which property is less important and we can meet more of our needs through the commons. Commoners need to claim their rights from a position of strength.

MB: One of your chapters reviews the experience of one of your interviewers and the FLOK Society project in Ecuador. What is your evaluation of that experience?

NS: The experience of FLOK, which was an effort to craft a country-sized commons transition, was very instructive for me. It was a chance to see commoning presented as a comprehensive social vision, not just as a series of isolated interventions. Cooperatives were a critical ingredient in all that, of course. And of course, too, the Ecuadorian government’s follow-through was very limited. But that process led to the Commons Transition resources, which have been invaluable for articulating in a comprehensive way what all this is about. For me it was a magnificent education. Everyone should have that experience once in a while—to participate in crafting a plan for the future of the world.

MB: Your engagement is strongly linked to your faith. How can one be a progressive Christian in this day and age?  Do you link to particular elements in that tradition?

NS: The more I got to know the cooperative tradition, the more I found it to be bound together with religious traditions. I saw this especially in my own Catholic tradition, which produced such examples as the North American cooperative banks and the great Mondragon worker cooperatives, but similar examples can be found in so many other faiths as well. I wouldn’t say that cooperation is in any way reducible to religion or dependent on it, but as with so many other major forces in our world, religion plays a vital and mysterious role.

I was personally grateful to discover, through this work, some new patron saints. For instance, Clare of Assisi, co-founder of the Franciscan order, insisted in the Middle Ages that her nuns should have the right to self-govern, and that all voices should be heard. John A. Ryan, a prominent Catholic economist in the early 20th century United States, wrote beautifully about the moral education that comes through cooperative business. Albert J. McKnight, also a priest, brought a Pan-Africanist vision to the development of the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. And those of us trapped in English are in dire need of more translations from the work of José María Arizmendiarrieta, the half-blind priest who founded the Mondragon co-ops. Each of these people turned to cooperative economics out of a deep-rooted faith that God has endowed each of us with the dignity to be capable and deserving of co-governing our communities.

MB: How do you see the coming ‘phase transition’ unfold? How optimistic are you that humanity can pull this through?

NS: I’m not big on predictions, despite the subtitle of the book. But what I do know is that, if we decide we want to practice democracy in richer ways than most of us do now, we’re capable of it. The past makes that clear enough. It’s perfectly possible that someday we’ll look back and laugh at the current condition of vast inequalities and autocratic corporations and the occasional ballot box. But at present it seems just as likely that we’ll give up on democracy entirely as that we’ll opt for ever more excellent forms of it.

The following excerpt is republished from Everything for Everyone, by Nathan Schneider:

Phase Transition

Commonwealth

The first time I saw it, I took the metaphor literally. “We will all meet in Quito for a ‘crater-​like summit,’“ the website said. “We will ascend the sides of the volcano together in order to go down to the crater and work.” Alongside those words was a picture of Quilotoa, a caldera in the Ecuadorian Andes where a blue-​green lake has accumulated in the hole left by a cataclysmic eruption seven hundred years ago, enclosed by the volcano’s two-​mile-​wide rim.

What the website beckoned visitors to was something less geologically spectacular than Quilotoa, but possibly earth-​shaking in its own right. The government of Ecuador had sponsored a project to develop policies for a new kind of economy, one based on concepts more familiar in hackerspaces and startups than in legislatures. The project was called FLOK Society—free, libre, open knowledge. Its climactic event, which took place in May 2014, was called a summit, but the nod to Quilotoa’s crater was a way of saying this wasn’t the usual top-​down policy meeting. Nor were the people behind it the usual policymakers.

Michel Bauwens, the fifty-​six-​year-​old leader of the FLOK Society research team, held no PhD, nor experience in government, nor steady job, nor health insurance. A native of Belgium, he lived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, with his wife and their two children, except when he left on long speaking tours. He dressed simply—a T‑shirt to the first day of the summit, then a striped tie the day of his big address. His graying hair was cropped close around his bald crown like a monk’s. He spoke softly; people around him tended to listen closely. The Spanish hacktivists and Ecuadorian bureaucrats who dreamed up FLOK chose for their policy adviser an unemployed commoner.

If Ecuador was to leapfrog ahead of the global hegemons, it would need a subversive strategy. “It’s precisely because the rest of the world is tending toward greater restrictions around knowledge that we have to figure out ways of producing that don’t fall within the confines of these predominant models,” Ecuador’s minister of education, science, technology, and innovation, Rene Ramirez, told me. He and other government officials were talking about dispensing with such strictures as copyright, patents, and corporate hierarchies. “We are essentially pioneers in this endeavor. We’re breaking new ground.”

At first this was a subversion mutually beneficial to guests and hosts alike. Several months before the summit, Bauwens said that FLOK was a “sideways hack” — of the country, maybe even of the global economy. “It’s taking advantage of a historic opportunity to do something innovative and transformative in Ecuador.” He saw a chance to set the conditions for a commonwealth.

FLOK bore the style and contradictions of Ecuador’s brand at the time. The president, Rafael Correa, sometimes spoke in favor of open-​source software; WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange had been living in Ecuador’s London embassy since 2012. Even while exploiting rain-​forest oil resources and silencing dissenters, Correa’s administration called for changing the country’s “productive matrix” from reliance on finite resources in the ground to the infinite possibilities of unfettered information. Yet most of the North Americans I met in Quito were out of a job because Correa had recently outlawed foreign organizations, likely for circulating inconvenient information about human rights.

As the summit approached, local politicians seemed to evade Bauwens and the team of researchers he’d brought there. Team members weren’t paid on time. Two dozen workshops about open knowledge took place across the country, with mixed response. By the time I met Bauwens in the gaudy apartment he was renting in Quito, a few days before the summit began, he looked exhausted from infighting with the Spaniards and wresting his staff‘s salaries from the government. “It’s going to be a much harder fight than I anticipated,” he said.

Bauwens had a knack for seeking out potent knowledge. He grew up in Belgium as the only child of two orphan parents. His curiosities drifted from Marxism as a teenager to, as an adult, various Californian spiritualities, which led him to Asian ones, then esoteric sects like Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry. Meanwhile, Bauwens put his cravings to work in business. He worked as an analyst for British Petroleum and then, in the early 1990s, started a magazine that helped introduce Flemish readers to the promise of the internet. As an executive at Belgacom, Belgium’s largest telecommunications company, he guided its entry into the online world by acquiring startups. And then, in 2002, he’d had enough. He quit, then moved with his second wife to her family’s home in Chiang Mai.

“Capitalism is a paradoxical system, where even the ruling class has a crappy life,” he says. He started to believe his unhappiness had cataclysmic causes.

For two years in Thailand, Bauwens read history. He studied the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism—a ”phase transition,” as he puts it. It was an age when the previous civilization was in crisis, and he concluded that what led the way forward was a shift in the primary modes of production. The Roman slave system collapsed, and then networks of monasteries spread innovations across Europe, helping to sow the seeds of the new order. What emerged was an interplay of craft guilds organizing free cities, warlords ruling from behind castle walls, and peasants living off common land. As the feudal system grew top-​heavy, networks of merchants prepared the way for the commercial, industrial reordering that followed.

With the internet’s networks, he came to believe that industrial civilization faced a crisis of comparable import, as well as the germ of what could come next. He zeroed in on the notion of commons-​based peer production— the modes by which online networks enable people to create and share horizontally, not as bosses and employees but as equals. It was a new rendition of the old medieval commons, but poised to become the dominant paradigm, not just a means of survival at the peripheries. He set out to find examples of where this world-​transformation was already taking place. By seeking, he found.

The bulk of Bauwens’ oeuvre lives on the collaborative wiki that long served as the website of his Foundation for Peer‑to‑Peer Alternatives—the P2P Foundation, for short. Its more than thirty thousand pages, which he has compiled with more than two thousand online coauthors, include material on topics from crowdsourcing to distributed energy to virtual currencies. His life’s work takes the form of a commons.

Bauwens tends to talk about his vision in the communal “we,” speaking not just for himself but for a movement in formation. He borrows a lot of the terms he relies on from others, then slyly fits them into a grander scheme than the originators envisioned. Put another way: “I steal from everyone.” Nevertheless, one is hard-​pressed to locate any enemies; rather than denouncing others, he tends to figure out a place for them somewhere in his system.

It was in and for Ecuador, together with his team, that Bauwens mapped out the next world-​historical phase transition for the first time. He believes that cooperatives are the event horizon. They’re bubbles of peer‑to‑peer potential that can persist within capitalism, and they can help the coming transition proceed.

They can decentralize production through local makerspaces while continually improving a common stock of open-​source designs. They can practice open-​book accounting to harmonize their supply chains and reduce carbon emissions. Open intellectual-​property licenses can help them share their resources for mutual benefit. As these networks grow, so will the commons they build, which will take over roles now played by government and private markets. Soon all the free-​flowing information, combined with co‑op businesses, will turn the economy into a great big Wikipedia or Linux—by anyone, for anyone. The industrial firm, whether capitalist or cooperative, will dissolve into collaborations among peers. Bauwens calls this process “cooperative accumulation.”

Co‑ops are not an end in themselves. They’re not the destination. But they’re the passageway to a peer‑to‑peer commons. “We see it as the strategic sector,” he told me. New cooperative experiments were spreading from Mississippi to Syria, and here was a chance to show how they could grow to the scale of an entire country.

The Quito convention center is a two-​story complex with stately white columns and hallways enclosed in walls of glass. Visible just a few blocks away is the National Congress building, the supposed destination of FLOK Society’s proposals. Volcanoes stand in the distance behind it, the city rising up as high on their slopes as it can manage. During the four days of the “Good Knowledge Summit,” as the event was called, bureaucrats in business casual worked alongside hackers in T‑shirts to develop and distill the discussions into policy.

The opening night included bold pronouncements. “This is not just an abstract dream,” said Guillaume Long, Ecuador’s minister of knowledge and human talent. “Many of the things we talk about these days will become a reality.” Rather than tax havens, added the subsecretary of science, technology, and innovation, Rina Pazos, “we need to establish havens of open and common knowledge.”

Bauwens spent most of his time in the sessions on policies for cooperatives. In Ecuador, as in many places, it is harder to start a co‑op than a private company. The Canadian co‑op expert John Restakis, a member of Bauwens’s research team, called on Ecuadorian officials to loosen the regulations and reporting requirements on co‑ops, and to enable more flexible, multi-stakeholder structures. The officials pushed back; the regulations were there for a reason, after waves of co‑op failures and abuses. Restakis and Bauwens pressed on. They wanted Ecuador’s government to serve as what they called a “partner state,” nurturing commons-​oriented activities without seeking to direct or control them.

By the summit’s end, the working groups had amassed a set of proposals, some more developed than others: wiki textbooks and free software in schools, open government data, new licenses for indigenous knowledge, community seed banks, a decentralized university. Mario Andino, the newly elected governor of Sigchos, one of Ecuador’s poorer regions, wanted to develop open-​source farm tools for difficult hillside terrain. Before the summit, Bauwens visited Sigchos and received a standing ovation for his presentation. “We could be a model community,” Andino said. But there were no promises.

Over the course of his life, Plato made several journeys from Athens to Syracuse, in Sicily, with the hope of making it a model of the kind of society he described in his Republic. The rulers there, however, fell far short of being the philosopher-​kings he needed; he returned home to retire and compose a more cynical kind of political theory. If not quite so discouraged, Bauwens seemed adrift after the summit ended. The work of FLOK Society was now in the hands of the Ecuadorians, and by that time, there was little indication the government would take more from the whole effort than a publicity stunt. Bauwens was already starting to look toward the next iteration; thanks in part to the process in Ecuador, there were signs of interest from people in Spain, Greece, Brazil, Italy, and Seattle. The same month as the summit, Cooperation Jackson held its Jackson Rising conference.

“Recognition by a nation-​state brings the whole idea of the commons to a new level,” Bauwens said. “We have to abandon the idea, though, that we can hack a country. A country and its people are not an executable program.”

Excerpted from Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider. Copyright © 2018. Available from Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Photo by thisisbossi

The post Everything for everyone: Michel Bauwens interviews Nathan Schneider 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.

Robert Raymond: The state of precarity inherent to most forms of digital labor and the unchecked exploitation of workers on many gig economy platforms is a largely under covered issue. Although there are some conversations around regulating companies that perpertrate such practices, issues of ownership and governance as they relate to questionable practices of various digital platforms are rarely given much consideration. But this is beginning to change with the rise in what is known as the platform cooperative movement, a broad network of individuals and organizations pushing to bring the values of cooperative ownership, governance, and management, into the digital labor landscape.

Trebor Scholz is an associate professor of culture and media at The New School in New York City, New York, and chair of the conference series “The Politics of Digital Culture.” He’s been an advocate of the platform cooperativism movement for many years and launched the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (Shareable is part of the Consortium), which was awarded a $1 million dollar grant from Google.org, this week. The grant “focuses specifically on creating a critical analysis of the digital economy, and designing open source tools that will support platform co-ops working in sectors such as child care, elder care, home services, and recycling​ in the United States, Brazil, Australia, Germany, and India,” according to a press release by The New School. “This grant is a big win for the cooperative movement and for platform co-op pioneers all over the world,” Scholz said in a statement. “This Kit will make it easier to start and run platform co-ops. It will also provide an interactive map of the co-op ecosystem and essential community-edited resources.” We talked to Scholz as he was working on the project about the potential of platform cooperatives in addressing many of the challenges in the digital world today.

Robert Raymond, Shareable: You are in the process of launching an ambitious project around strengthening and spreading the platform cooperative movement. The project consists of many different elements and is structured as a kind of development kit for platform co-ops. I’ll let you tell us all about it in just a second, but first, can you explain what a platform cooperative is, and what problem or challenge they are addressing?

Trebor Scholz, associate professor of culture and media at The New School: Platform co-ops are really about the broad-based ownership and democratic governance of digital platforms. So, imagine that Uber is owned by its drivers, or something like TaskRabbit is owned and operated by the workers. Or, in Europe, that Deliveroo is operated by the couriers and owned by the couriers. What this model leads to is a fair pay and a higher quality of work,so there is a dignity that you will not get in the extractive sharing economy. Also, the research on worker cooperatives shows that they are actually more productive than traditional businesses.

There are all sorts of economic and tax advantages as well. So think about something like AirBnb. You might be staying at an AirBnb in Amsterdam, or Barcelona, and much of the money spent at that Airbnb is taken out of the community, and the revenue doesn’t go through taxes into your local community, but is transferred instead right to Silicon Valley. On top of that there are all of the illegal operations of platforms like Uber and Lyft. It’s been proven, with the recent study from MIT, that these businesses contribute to a congestion of cities.

So, what the platform cooperativism movement is pushing back against is what I would sum up as a broken social contract. There are unsustainably low wages, compromised data and privacy, edge populations that aren’t considered in the design — so it’s a sort of big ego design, a waterfall design of Silicon Valley that pushes software onto people instead of co-designing it. There’s a shift away from direct employment which means a loss of worker voice and rights and benefits and of course centralized data ownership. The intellectual North Star for the alternative of the platform co-op model is really democratic governance, broad-based platform ownership.

So, tell us a bit about the Development Kit project.

The first part of the project is just to explain what is actually the problem with a business model like Lyft and many of these other companies, TaskRabbit, Deliveroo — what’s actually the problem? So that’s part of it, because I think it’s very important to actually change people’s mindsets about that.

Once they are convinced and are interested in actually changing it, they can see this whole ecosystem that already exists. So we are building a map that will have a lot of information about all of these cooperative platform businesses, some 240, that already exist, and then we will invite people to participate themselves. We are working at the Harvard Business Law School on a platform co-op legal clinic that is starting to get at the legal issues that exist in starting platform co-ops specifically, not just co-ops but platform co-ops,and trying to get these legal issues out of the way.

My initial idea was to somehow perhaps automate this, so that you can click and create a platform co-op, almost like a click-through legal contract. But that seems to be quite unlikely to happen because there are just way too many different co-op laws in the United States. But you know, why is it that you can’t just do something similar to what corporations do in Delaware, for example? You know, the vast majority of corporations in the U.S. actually incorporate in the state of Delaware. It’s an example of how one model in one state can work for all corporations. A centralized model. Why wouldn’t that be possible for cooperatives as well — just to make it simple?

The second thing is that we are starting an international network of lawyers through the Harvard network so that you could basically have lawyers in many countries where platform co-ops emerge that could help them to get the legal issues out of the way.

Another thing is that we are trying to address issues of governance. We’re trying to co-create and co-design, in direct collaboration with the co-ops themselves, a model where co-op members can use the platform to have a voice in the co-op itself. We are working with a group in India, for example, where the women are really dispersed all over the state of Gujarat. And so they have a hard time actually being meaningful members of the co-op, and so we tried to change that.

The third thing is an open source labor platform. So, basically something that can be customized for various users. So anyone trying to build one only needs a small amount of money to be able to start a platform like that. And yeah, so these are just some of the many things we are working on co-designing as part of this project.

And so it sounds like the idea of co-designing, of co-creating this toolkit, in a collaborative and participatory way plays a central role in this project?

That’s right. This needs to be opened up to the whole community — like to really activate the community around it and really do this with the community and not just for the community.That’s the idea. I’d like to really activate groups and really work with people, alongside people, and do it with them. I think that’s the way to go. And yeah, the project starts in July and will run for two years. After which, of course, we hope to get more funding and also try to engage other foundations to build on this. We are laying the technical foundations now, and there will be all of this infrastructure that will exist, that will be built, and the hope is that now others can come in and say, “Can you do this in Georgia, can you do this in Ohio?” You name it.

Can you describe some of the projects, some of the communities that you are working with or hoping to work with?

There are babysitters in Illinois, for example, that were organized by the union, and now we are coming in and adding an onboarding tool for them and maybe helping with a labor platform. And then there are these women in Ahmedabad, India, that I mentioned earlier, who we are working with to bring beauty services to people’s houses — like a platform service for doing hair and makeup, you know. So they are training twenty-seven women right now and in the fall it will be seventy-five, and then it will grow from there. And they are already all organized in a co-op and they will basically bring this sort of service to urban, young professionals.

There are many other projects. We talked to these 2,000 Uber drivers in Cape Town who wanted to drop out and start a platform co-op, we talked with trash pickers in the informal economy in Cairo, Egypt. There is no trash collection there and so through the Coptic Church these people get organized and want to start a platform where people can order trash pick-ups from them, and they would get paid for them. All these very, very diverse applications.

What is your ultimate dream for this project?

Well the project itself is much bigger than what we have right now. So, the goal is really to go into what we call “pull markets” — so markets where you don’t need so much marketing. For example, social care. There you see basically what we are doing, what we’re addressing, and then also what is not funded, you know? The dream is basically like a full-cycle implementation of this model in various territories. So we have projects that we could do in Brazil, and Colombia with refugees, in Germany, and you know all over the place. It’s very exciting.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Header illustration by Susie Cagle

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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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For a sizable portion of the people running the established cooperatives in the United States, I’ve found, the internet is still regarded as a kind of alien invasion, an ever-bewildering source of trouble. Along with the hassle of building and maintaining a website, the internet has brought new competitors—especially venture-backed startups that love nothing more than to disrupt the kinds of intermediary roles in value chains where co-ops have held niches for decades. And many co-ops seem stuck playing catch-up. They buy the latest software and hire expensive consultants, but it’s never quite enough. The disruptions keep coming.

Playing catch-up is never the role co-ops are best suited for, anyway. They’re at their best when they’re doing another kind of business—when they’re finding value that investors don’t see, when they’re meeting needs that Wall Street doesn’t bother figuring out how to meet.

This is what a new generation of cooperative entrepreneurs is doing. I’d like to introduce you to some of them, and to some of the ways that they’re doing better than catching up to the internet of venture capitalists and aspiring monopolists. They’re letting co-op values and principles guide them to a vision for a different kind of internet economy. As they do, they’re also rediscovering the competitive advantages of cooperation—old strategies, really, that powered this model in generations past but that can be too easily forgotten.

First, take a foray with me into the mind of one of our eminent internet overlords. Consider it a survey of the terrain.

In February 2017, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was still coming to terms with the previous year’s election cycle, he published a post called “Building Global Community,” a manifesto of sorts. “In the last year,” he wrote, “the complexity of the issues we’ve seen has outstripped our existing processes for governing the community.” Then he admitted, remarkably, that he couldn’t rule a platform shared by billions of human beings out of the wisdom of his own head.

And so he called for something that sounds almost like democracy: “Building an inclusive global community requires establishing a new process for citizens worldwide to participate in community governance. I hope that we can explore examples of how collective decision-making might work at scale.”

As autocracy and oligarchy run aground, he reluctantly falls back on democracy, then announces it as if it were the latest software update. Should we or should we not tell him that cooperatives have been practicing forms of “collective decision-making at scale” for a long, long time? Perhaps they have something to teach him. Perhaps they can do what Facebook’s investor-owners can’t.

Business model innovation

The designers of the internet didn’t set out to build infrastructure for cat-meme-sharing on social-media monopolies. Paul Baran, who conceived of the “packet switching” system by which the cat memes and all else travel from server to server, was concerned about a Soviet missile attack. In the 1960s, Baran worked for the RAND Corporation, which was helping to build the military communications tool that would later evolve into the civilian internet. The system relied on a complex collaboration among peers to avoid any single, vulnerable point of failure.

Radically centralized systems like Facebook are a departure from the network’s underlying structure. They arose not for technical reasons but economic ones—to deliver the profits that early investors demanded. Centralizing Baran’s distributed scheme has been a gradual, expensive process. Much more akin to the internet’s design are standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium, which balance the needs of diverse stakeholders. The internet, like a co-op, is built for federation.

Over and over, we have seen old, cooperative practices imitated online. Take the wonders of crowdfunding, which enable businesses and products to launch without the need for loans or profit-seeking investors; well, co-ops were the original crowdfunding. When people needed something the market wasn’t furnishing, they pooled their money and built a cooperative to provide it. And they got more than one gets in the usual Kickstarter: real ownership and accountability. Around half of U.S. households have an Amazon Prime membership, which delivers convenience to customers and loyalty to the company—but, again, without shared ownership and accountability to back it up. The internet giants are getting by with a pale imitation of what co-ops have in their bones.

The technology has added something new, however. When we talk about the online economy, we’re not just talking about slapping websites on existing business models. The real disruptions have been bigger than e-commerce; they’re happening through platforms. Platforms are a kind of business model that the internet has supercharged: multi-sided markets that generate value through interactions among users, not just through what the company provides to them. The canonical and over-used examples are platforms like Airbnb, the hotel chain that owns no hotels, and Uber, the taxi company that owns no cars.

Once again, cooperatives got to it first. When rural electric co-ops were forming across the U.S. in the 1940s, they depended on their members’ collaboration and sweat equity to build a shared asset. Marketing co-ops have enabled independent producers to set the terms on which they sell and even compete. For decades, Italian “social co-ops” have maintained balanced markets between care providers and patients who co-own their companies together.

With age, however, many co-ops have conformed themselves to the business models of their corporate competitors. They’ve come to focus on the value the co-op can deliver to members, not on the unpredictable interconnections it might facilitate. It’s service more than sharing. The rise of online platforms thus presents itself as a terrifying disruption, when it should be an opportunity for co-ops to take the lead.

The investor-owned platforms have been ambivalent creatures. In come Amazon’s conveniences, and out go the local retailers that co-ops enabled to thrive. In come flexible schedules on gig platforms like TaskRabbit, and out go protections and benefits that workers have fought for centuries to achieve. Inequality and conglomeration accelerate. And there’s no going back; the perks are too irresistible. But what if co-ops could face those disruptions on their own terms, with their own strengths? What if they invested in a new generation of cooperative innovation instead?

Silicon Valley likes to have us believe that innovation is the purview of its investor-driven formula. But when you look at a lot of the most successful companies there, they didn’t begin with a miraculous invention. From the GPS behind Uber to Google’s original search algorithm, the tech often comes from publicly funded research in government and universities. The Silicon Valley magic, more often, lies in spinning up a seamless interface and the means to monetize it.

According to Fred Wilson, a renowned investor at Union Square Ventures, “Business model innovation is more disruptive than technological innovation.” What innovations can the co-op model deliver?

The rise of platform cooperativism

I’ve been dwelling in abstractions so far, and please forgive me for that, because what I’m talking about is not an abstraction at all. I came to notice the potential that cooperative business might have for reinventing the online economy not through theoretical reflection but, as a reporter, by noticing how people were already making it happen.

Starting around 2014, hiding behind the fanfare and controversy surrounding “sharing economy” platforms like Airbnb and Uber, I began coming across startups that were trying to build a real sharing economy. This usually meant adopting cooperative models. They were working in isolation, not aware of one another, with little in the way of mentoring or co-op-friendly financing to support them. But there they were. By the end of that year, I was publishing about what I’d found, and one of my sources, the New School media professor Trebor Scholz, put a name to it all: “platform cooperativism.” The following year, we organized the first conference on the subject in New York, and more than a thousand people came. Even The Washington Post called it “a huge success.” Something real was indeed afoot.

At first, we had the idea that we could simply copy the Ubers and Airbnbs of the world, slap a co-op label on, and the world would switch over. But the more I’ve watched this platform co-op ecosystem grow, the more I get excited about how cooperation allows these businesses to do things differently. Cooperative ownership isn’t just some add-on mutation, it’s another sort of genome.

Quality, not monopoly

One of the earliest, most successful platform co-ops is Stocksy United, a Canadian stock photo platform owned by its photographers and employees. Its founders were executives for a much bigger platform who concluded investor-ownership was stiffing the photographers and hurting the quality of their work. The founders realized that if they made their startup accountable to its photographers, they could prioritize quality. After just a few years, the company is thriving in a crowded industry.

Stocksy also breaks a cardinal rule for tech startups. You’re supposed to achieve scale at all costs, but the thousand-or-so photographer-owners have been cautious about accelerating their growth. They don’t want to dilute what they offer. They’re growing, but only at their own pace and far slower than they could. They’re making their own rules.

Control over what’s ours

It has become an implicit social contract of life online that—in exchange for useful services like Gmail and Uber—we give up heaps of data about ourselves to who-knows-who for who-knows-what. But for platform co-ops, this trade-off tends to disappear. Users really can be the owners of their data from start to finish. There’s no more need for all the funny business hidden in the legalese no one reads.

MIDATA, for instance, is a Swiss co-op for personal medical data funded through the voluntary use of that data for medical research. Users get a convenient repository over which they have full control. Savvy Cooperative, based in New York, is a platform where medical researchers and startups can benefit from the data of patient feedback—on the patients’ terms, because the patients are the owners. Farmers are doing something similar through the Grower Information Services Cooperative, which allows them to benefit from the data their ever-more computerized machines produce without relinquishing it to third parties.

Federation not centralization

Social.coop brings that kind of user control to social media. It is a small experiment that operates an open-source alternative to Twitter called Mastodon—a federated system in which people can keep their data with a provider they know and trust, while still interacting with the wider network. Federated social networks like this are great for privacy, and the technology has been around for a while. They’ve just lacked a business model, since investors have so much to gain from highly centralized networks. Co-ops might be uniquely suited to change that.

Social.coop is unusual in other ways. It’s not legally incorporated; instead, it operates through Open Collective, a co-op-friendly platform that enables groups of people anywhere to collect money and distribute it without their own bank account. Accounting on Open Collective is public, for all to see and inspect. Social.coop members make decisions about how to use those resources and more on Loomio, a decision-making platform built by a New Zealand-based worker co-op. Most of them—well, us—have never met each other in person. We’ve built the trust we need to cooperate through transparency.

Trust on a trustless network

When the Bitcoin digital currency system first appeared in 2009, it promised the possibility of “trustless,” pseudonymous transactions over a network that would rely on no central authorities, like Visa or the Federal Reserve. Companies like Goldman Sachs and Walmart are now adopting the underlying “blockchain” technology. So are credit unions. A project called CU Ledger uses blockchain technology to better manage, secure and share data about credit union members’ identities. The credit unions, that is, are applying Bitcoin’s software to purposes nearly opposite from what others have in mind: to build on institutional trust and to better collaborate.

As the blockchain economy grows, co-ops may be poised to play a vital role. RChain, for instance, is built on a supposition that the co-op model can solve some of the technical bottlenecks that Bitcoin and its cousins have faced. In Berlin, Seedbloom puts the co-ownership back into crowdfunding with blockchains. Already, it has aided the development of Resonate, a music-streaming cooperative co-owned, over its own blockchain, by fans and musicians alike. Moeda, starting in Brazil, is a co-op that uses blockchains to help credit unions expand financial inclusion and to finance its own growth.

Venture capital as cooperative bank

For this platform co-op ecosystem to grow, it will have to develop its own means of financing, just as co-op sectors of the past have done. Already we’ve started to see developments like Purpose Ventures, a new fund designed to grow long-term with its startups, not to sell them off for a quick buck. It’s co-op compatible; in some respects it even resembles an old-fashioned cooperative bank.

The old and the new come together. They converge. And they need each other. One of the most important developments in recent years has been to see co-op veterans start to embrace and support this new generation.

This has been done before

The conditions that have given rise to cooperation in the past are appearing in new guises—workers barely getting by on gig platforms, or customers not sure whether they can trust the companies they nonetheless rely on. It’s not enough for co-ops to tack websites on existing business models. We need co-op business models designed in and for a networked world.

I must confess, however: When I’m in a room full of leaders in big, established co-ops, I’m not sure these kinds of innovations will come from them. I bet most of them would agree. But what we need isn’t coming from the small, experimental platform co-ops I’ve mentioned either. They’re not enough. We need both. We need experienced co-op mentors stepping in to support the new, risk-taking co-op entrepreneurs who will help keep this sector vibrant.

How can that happen? First, it needs to be easier for startups to see the co-op model as a viable option—with tech-oriented co-op incubators and seed capital, as well as outreach to existing startup communities. Second, established co-ops can find ways to pool their funds to invest in promising new co-ops, then share dividends back to their members. Finally, we need to identify the financing and policy tools to help existing platforms that should be co-op converts. Too many online platforms we depend on are stuck trying to meet investor demands when they should instead be accountable to their users.

I’m a reporter, so I don’t like to make predictions. But based on the experiments out there, I’ve noticed some patterns that may become more common in the co-ops to come.

They will create value not just with the services they offer to members, but with the connections they enable among members—and the efficiencies members discover together. Their specialty will be in fostering trust on trustless networks, federating local communities across the globe. And they will build on the long cooperative legacy with forms of online governance that are more transparent than both the competition and co-ops past.

Open software and open data could help co-ops cooperative with each other more deeply than ever. Open supply-chains could display, for potential customers to see, their commitment to the highest quality sourcing. If they’re doing their jobs right, greater transparency will only make the cooperative difference more evident. And that difference matters.

I meet more and more people all the time who are warming to the co-op idea—and not because they’ve already worked for co-ops or studied co-op history. For the most part, they haven’t. A cooperative internet might seem utopian, but they hope for it anyway.

I don’t think it is so far-fetched. Cooperatives brought electricity to rural America when no one else would, and they’ve given Main Street a fighting chance against the big boxes. They help millions buy homes. They pioneered the local, organic revival and the means of delivering fair-trade products from across the planet. Next, the internet. We have done this already, and we can do it again, even better than before.

Photo by Pat Guiney

The post Next, the Internet: Building a Cooperative Digital Space appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The disappointments of the online economy – for instance, user surveillance and systemic labor abuses – stem at least in part from its failures to meaningfully share ownership and governance with relevant stakeholders. Under the banner of ‘platform cooperativism’, an emerging network of cooperative developers, entrepreneurs, labor organizers and scholars is developing an economic ecosystem that seeks to align the ownership and governance of enterprises with the people whose lives are most affected by them. This represents a radical critique of the existing online economy, but it’s also a field of experimentation for alternative forms of ownership design. This essay presents and analyzes some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that could serve the platform economy of the future differently than the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

Acknowledgments
This essay stems from an ongoing collaboration with Trebor Scholz, and while he is innocent of my oversights, I am indebted to his insights. The following has also benefited from the input and feedback of Devin Balkind, Josef Davies-Coates, Enric Duran, Daniel Hu, Brent Hueth, Tim Kuhn and Keith Taylor, in part through an open review process at https://ioo.coop.

On March 18, 2016, at a press conference with US Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez on his right and a platform user named Ty Lane on his left, Managed by Q CEO Dan Teran announced, ‘Over the next five years, Managed by Q will give 5 percent of the company to the operators working in the field’.¹ On the backdrop behind them, Managed by Q’s logo – a futuristic, sans-serif grey Q repeated over a black background, much like Uber’s U – evoked the company’s status as one of the many trying to be ‘the Uber for x’ – in this case, the Uber for office-cleaning. But Teran’s announcement represented a departure from Uber’s notorious disavowal of employment responsibility for its drivers, whom it seems impatient to supplant with self-driving cars. In addition to full-time jobs and benefits, Managed by Q was welcoming the platform’s worker-users as genuine co-owners.

Co-ownership has mostly been missing in the implicit social contracts of online platforms – the Internet-enabled, multi-sided markets that employ networked forms of connection and transaction to transform industries, workplaces and livelihoods (Parker et al., 2016). The principal owners of platforms, along with founders, have been the investors who inject capital in expectation of generous returns. Technology companies may offer stock options to early employees; users, in contrast, have been treated like external customers. Yet in many cases they don’t pay the company any money while contributing essential content (e.g., virtually everything one encounters on platforms like Facebook or Reddit), even entrusting to the platform their personal data and their livelihoods. Platforms train users to think of themselves as participants in ‘peer production’ (Benkler, 2007) and a ‘sharing economy’ (Schor, 2014). But the online economy’s ownership structures habitually fail to reflect either the platforms’ stated aspirations or their social realities.

Managed by Q’s directors, however, recognized that its office-cleaning ‘operators’ were a class of users that served as the company’s face to the office-owning clients who provided revenue; co-ownership, therefore, seemed like an appropriate way to incentivize operators to take their responsibility seriously. The announcement also made for good press.

Canonical notions of corporate structure and governance, even when they encompass a wide variety of stakeholders, tend to affirm the practice of granting ownership and control to investors, since they bear direct financial risk (Jensen, 2000; Monks and Minow, 2008; Parmar et al., 2010). But when platforms hold near-monopoly status and wield control over urban transportation networks or data about intimate relationships, their risk profile is more complex than a share price. Platforms increasingly act as infrastructure, enabling productive activity among users – from individuals to large organizations. They’re not just a means of production but a means of connection. These webs of dependency, however, have not reached the platforms’ boardrooms. Managed by Q’s experience, together with a growing body of research on cooperative models, suggests that platform builders may be missing out on opportunities shared ownership could present – from retention, loyalty and diversity among their users to untapped potential for financing and public benefit (Albæk and Schultz, 1998; Davidson, 2016; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Pérotin, 2016).

The platforms now vying for dominance have tended not to maintain high labor standards among user-workers and other contractors, even bending the law in the process (Scholz, 2016b, Slee, 2016). Platform-based workers typically lack the expectation of coverage for illness, injury and retirement. The allure is real, as platforms offer the possibility of independent livelihoods, a departure from the drudgery and discipline of an old-fashioned job. But platform owners enjoy the far more lucrative benefits of having a fluid workforce without a large, fixed payroll. Investor-owners have little to lose and much to gain from sidestepping the conventional responsibilities of employment.

Less visibly, the mismatch between the interests of platform owners and users presents itself in the realm of data. Ubiquitous platforms like Facebook and Google, as well as others that operate more discreetly, gather reams of data about Internet users and offer it as a product. This data supplies a growing surveillance economy based on targeted advertising and pricing, which, intentionally or not, easily bleeds into discrimination of already marginalized populations (Bernasek and Mongan, 2015; Couldry, 2016; Pasquale, 2015). Although a platform like Facebook may insist that users retain ownership of their data, immense and illegible service agreements grant the platform such sweeping rights over that data as to render user ownership close to meaningless. Additionally, the prospect that one’s online activity might affect a credit rating, or find its way into the database of a spy agency, has already dampened the free speech that the Internet once promised.

As the platform economy reorients how industries operate, it should also challenge taken-for-granted corporate ownership models. Cooperative ownership not only shares wealth more equitably among participants, but it also unlocks efficiencies by reducing the costs of transacting and contracting with an enterprise’s essential stakeholders (Bogetoft, 2005; Hansmann, 2000; Hueth, 2014; Molk, 2014; Taylor, 2015). Online platforms have yet to enjoy the value and benefits of this model. The time seems especially ripe to take up the challenge that Marjorie Kelly (2012) has described as ‘ownership design’: What ownership structures are appropriate, competitive and just for an economy orchestrated through platforms? How can corporate structure better align the feedback loops of actual online sociality?

One collective effort to address these questions, and one in which I have been involved, has come to be called ‘platform cooperativism’. As well as a rhetorical insurgency, this initative has opened a space of experimentation in online ownership design, taking inspiration from the legacy and ownership designs of the mostly offline cooperative movement. I will present and analyze here some of the ways platform cooperativism has begun to generate ownership designs that may serve the platform economy of the future differently than have the investor-owned structures that currently prevail.

‘The next sharing economy’

Cooperative economies of some kind have probably existed as long as human economies in general. But in parallel with the rise of industrial capitalism, they have formed a distinct and transnational sector, with shared values and business practices of its own. From local food and housing co-ops to vast co-ops of farmers, retail stores, or electric utilities, this sector generates over $2.2 trillion in turnover worldwide, often in ways that serve needs unmet by investor-owned businesses.² It’s a part of the global economy widely relied upon yet overlooked, a ‘sharing economy’ before Silicon Valley adopted the term.

The prospect of platform cooperativism is at once new and old among the cultures surrounding the Internet. Early software and hardware hackers employed certain cooperative-like practices as they assembled the rudiments of the personal computer and the means of networking them. They shared source code; they developed structures of democratic governance across great distances; they resisted corporate enclosure in the process (Benkler, 2007; Coleman, 2012; Kelty, 2008). Small groups of software developers have formed successful worker-cooperatives.³ Some of tech culture’s innovations deserve to be studied more closely by the offline cooperative movement, as they demonstrate the plausibility of, and some proven techniques for, highly distributed and productive self-management; many co-ops emerging among young people today are organized around tech culture’s flexible, networked forms of connection rather than recreating industrial-era jobs and membership societies. Platform cooperativism, therefore, is not starting from scratch in tech culture.

Still, true cooperative business models have been almost entirely absent from the online economy. One can at least speculate about the reasons why. The disruptive efficacy of the venture-capital financing mechanism has rendered it a go-to blueprint to the exclusion of other approaches. The technological sophistication necessary to build online enterprises has also proved prohibitive for the often-marginalized communities that tend to adopt cooperative strategies. And until recently the Internet could be considered an optional realm of activity; co-ops tend to appear when people have an unmet need, not to furnish a mere accessory or curiosity. But it is becoming harder and harder, around the world, to secure a livelihood without taking part in the online economy. Perhaps this is why, in the past few years, recognizable platform co-ops have begun to appear.

The Spanish collective Las Indias distinguished platforms as one type of cooperative in a 2011 blog post (de Ugarte). In 2012 the Italian federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto for ‘Cooperative Commons’, stressing the need for cooperative business models to manage the growing stores of data that users feed to online platforms.⁴ Stocksy United, a stock-photo platform owned by its photographers, went online the following year. By 2014, Janelle Orsi, founder of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Oakland, was calling for ‘the next sharing economy’⁵ – the sharing of cooperative ownership – and was helping to design the bylaws for Loconomics, a gig platform owned by its workers. I began documenting such projects in collaboration with the online newsletter Shareable (Schneider, 2014); meanwhile, drawing on the lessons of his Digital Labor conferences at The New School, Trebor Scholz coined the term ‘platform cooperativism’ as an alternative to the systemic abuses of investor-owned platforms (Scholz, 2014 and 2016a). In consultation with labor organizations and platform workers, Scholz and I co-organized the 2015 Digital Labor conference, ‘Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy’, and co-edited a subsequent book, Ours to Hack and to Own (2017). People around the world trying to develop online platforms through democratic ownership and governance began to coalesce their scattered efforts into a new economic ecosystem.

Since early 2015, along with Devin Balkind of Sarapis and others, I have maintained The Internet of Ownership⁶, the most exhaustive directory to date of the platform co-op ecosystem, and I lean heavily on that experience here. The directory includes not only ‘co-op platforms’ (which adhere to the International Co-operative Alliance’s standards for cooperative identity, detailed below) and various tools and organizations that support them, but also ‘sharing platforms’ (like Managed by Q) that practice shared ownership or governance with platform users, at least in part.

Platform cooperativism can likewise be taken to mean a broad invitation to a fairer online economy through shared ownership and governance; platform co-ops, however, are strictly those platforms that are also bona-fide co-ops by widely agreed-on standards (Sutton et al., 2016). The most recent revision of the principles that the International Co-operative Alliance holds,⁷ adopted in 1995, is as follows:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership
2. Democratic Member Control
3. Member Economic Participation
4. Autonomy and Independence
5. Education, Training and Information
6. Co-operation among Co-operatives
7. Concern for Community

To clarify these, the ICA promulgates the accompanying ‘values’ of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity.

Most of the cooperative principles resonate somewhat with the social contracts of the platform economy. ‘Voluntary and open membership’ is a default practice among platforms, which typically enable anyone (with access to requisite technology) to create an account; ‘autonomy and independence’, too, is a value that platform owners often assert while disrupting incumbent industries, even while proclaiming a well-meaning ‘concern for community’. There is much ‘co-operation’ among platform companies as well, such as through API protocols and standards-setting organizations like the World Wide Web Consortium. Practices of ‘education, training and information’ often happen on platforms through much the kind of mutual education – in online forums and in-person meetups – that cooperatives encourage among their members.

The resonance, however, only goes so far. Principles two and three above – democratic governance and ownership, crucially – are almost wholly absent from the platform economy. Online user-experience design often seeks to divert users’ attention from matters of governance and ownership, such as by rendering opaque the processes of revenue generation through apparently ‘free’ services. Consultation with users on changes to features or policies is, at best, superficial.

Democracy itself has taken on a new meaning online. A Web search for ‘democratize internet’ or the like reveals that in tech culture ‘democracy’ has come to signify merely an expansion of access to various tools and resources, rather than the collective governance and joint stakeholdership to which the word, in other contexts, refers. That old kind of democracy is illegible to the Internet’s dominant ownership designs. The contention of platform cooperativism is that the design of platform businesses, and thus of the online economy generally, can and should allow for democracy in the fullest sense. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, and cooperation won’t necessarily produce the appropriate response to every design challenge. But these kinds of designs are worth at least considering far more than they have been in the online economy thus far.

I hope I can be forgiven for leaving the necessary, important task of raising objections about the value and prospects of platform cooperativism to others. I look forward to learning from them. But it has seemed to me a better use of this space to offer a broad sketch of the movement’s progress. I hope, also, that the critiques of this nascent movement might come in the form of challenges rather than repudiations that could cut it at the root. It should be a foregone conclusion, but is too often not, that in a society that claims to be democratic, the advancement of democracy into new spheres of social life should be a question of how, not whether.

Ownership designs

In the following I introduce some of the design patterns (Alexander et al., 1977) that have so far arisen in the experimentation of platform cooperativism and related undertakings. Most of the projects referred to can be found in The Internet of Ownership directory, as well as the ‘showcases’ in Ours to Hack and to Own. I draw from published material on their websites and my conversations with their participants. While nearly all are too early-stage for a thoroughgoing evaluation, the patterns they embody at least trace the outlines of a new palette of options for ownership design in the online economy.

Work: Value creators as value owners

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform, which enables posting and carrying out piece-work tasks (tag some images, transcribe a recording, fill out a survey), gets its name from an eighteenth-century curiosity in which a human chess player sat discreetly inside a machine, dazzling the public and contemporary notables alike with its apparently mechanical intelligence. The reference is too apt for comfort; the human beings working on Mechanical Turk appear through the platform almost as if they were just another algorithm. Starting in 2014, these workers mounted a widely publicized email-writing campaign called ‘Dear Jeff Bezos’, alerting the Amazon CEO to the fact that ‘Turkers are not only actual human beings, but people who deserve respect, fair treatment and open communication’.⁸

Workers on Mechanical Turk, for instance, enjoy no minimum wage or ability to rate the behavior of the pseudonymous employers who meanwhile rate theirs. And while this case is egregious, it is not unique. In 2016, as many as 24 percent of US adults reported earning income on platforms (Smith, 2016). The prevailing platform business model is to achieve scale while reducing labor costs and interference in management, automating tasks wherever possible.

Platform cooperativism inclines toward another approach, one in which the people contributing value co-own the platforms and help decide to what ends they operate. The aforementioned Loconomics, for instance, is a platform co-op for short-term gigs in which the workers are co-owners; unlike ‘Turkers’, who rarely receive replies from Amazon when they submit complaints, Loconomics is designed to benefit from worker participation in governance. Its worker-owners invest in the platform through periodic dues. Also in the San Francisco area, the SEIU United Healthcare Workers West union is backing the Nursing and Caregivers Cooperative, through which the nurses collectivize and co-mange the terms under which they deploy their labor on their app, NursesCan. The stock-photo platform Stocksy United, incorporated as a Canadian cooperative, has found that including the photographers as members (alongside staff and founders) is a way of recruiting more talented contributors than might otherwise be possible, and of prioritizing artistic quality over ruthless expansion.

Part of securing fair work-lives on platforms is the development of ‘portable benefits’ that don’t rely on any one employer, but that better suit the promiscuous connectivity of a platform economy. This, too, is a job well suited to co-op models – hearkening back to the cooperative mutuals that gave birth to the modern insurance industry. The Freelancers Union in the United States and SMart in Europe are membership organizations that have delivered benefits to many thousands of independent workers, relying heavily on online tools. This kind of model, often in cooperative forms, is proliferating rapidly (Conaty et al., 2016).

The storied successes of twentieth-century worker cooperativism – such as the Mondragon Corporation in the Basque Country and the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy – sought to secure full-time industrial jobs. But many in the latest generation of co-ops seem designed to free their members from the need for a job altogether. Prime Produce, for instance, is a cooperative co-working space in New York City that prefers the language and ethic of ‘craft’ over ‘work’; the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral aspires to redefine work as ‘stuff that matters’. ‘Open companies’ (such as Gratipay, a crowdfunding platform) or ‘open value networks’ (such as Sensorica, which develops scientific instruments) have sought to rely on no employees at all, but to create products by rewarding the contributions of participants through a distributed platform. In Barcelona and the surrounding region, the Catalan Integral Cooperative draws member-owners in first by facilitating freelance work, and then by enabling them to obtain food, housing and services through internal trade and mutual credit rather than relying on euros. Some of its members have been involved in creating FairCoop, which proposes to do much the same on a global scale by connecting local ‘nodes’ through online tools, including a cryptocurrency called FairCoin (Schneider, 2015b).

Platforms need not regard those who contribute value through them as temporary stand-ins for algorithms. By orienting their business models around such contributors, platforms can provide not only decent livelihoods, but also a means of bypassing dependency on employment relations altogether.

Data: Treat it like it’s someone’s stuff

Much as Mechanical Turk disguises value-contributing workers behind a platform, business models based on so-called ‘big data’ often seek to disguise the fact that they’re capturing value from those contributing it. Facebook, for instance, provides extensive privacy controls by which users can customize what other users see about them – few of which affect, however, what Facebook itself sees, records and claims license to monetize. The economic power and promise of large pools of human data depend on the relinquishment of certain ownership rights by the humans involved, such as through opaque service agreements. These pools, in turn, can become outsourced repositories for government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies.

What would less duplicitous ownership designs for data look like? Commodify.us, for instance, has pioneered a model by which users can download a copy of their data from Facebook, then re-upload it, selecting which license they would like to apply to each data set – allowing them to monetize their data on their own terms. A more developed version of that general idea is TheGoodData, a London-based co-op, which allows users to monetize their browsing data with a browser extension and donate the proceeds to charitable causes. Meanwhile, under the aegis of MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute, an ambitious initiative called Solid (‘SOcial Linked Data’) proposes a framework for a new species of social applications based on modular, consensual data-sharing agreements, granting users granular control over what they share.

Given the centrality of trust and ownership in matters of data, particularly highly personal data, cooperative business models may be especially well suited to building data economies that are both transparent and competitive. Starting with highly sensitive medical data, the Swiss platform MIDATA.coop is developing a business model for personal data storage based on cooperative ownership and governance, together with secure open-source software. In the United Kingdom, a research project called OurData.coop is exploring the potential for a widespread system of such data co-ops, through which people could both retain control over and selectively monetize data that they produce.

A further use-case for data co-ops is in practicing the sixth cooperative principle of cooperation among cooperatives. Already, established co-ops like Ringlink Scotland (which supports agricultural business development) facilitate data-sharing among their members. Newer projects, such as the U.S.-based Data Commons Cooperative and CoopData.org, seek to provide platforms for data-sharing among co-ops that can help them find each other and work together. The promise of big data need not depend on ambiguous or misleading ownership arrangements.

Code: Keep the lords’ hands out of the commons

At least since the Charter of the Forest that accompanied the Magna Carta, people who live by and co-manage common resources have found the need to protect them from the acquisitive tendencies of those at the top of the social pyramid (Linebaugh, 2009). In order to protect the code-sharing habits of early hacker culture from the proprietary urges of corporations and universities, Richard Stallman inaugurated the Free Software movement with the GNU Public License in 1989. This and similar ‘copyleft’ licenses were quintessential hacks, turning intellectual-property law against itself by employing an author’s copyright privileges in order to liberate her code into a commons, free for anyone – with the requisite skills, equipment and time – to use, adapt and improve. Legal scholar Lawrence Lessig pioneered the transfer of this same hack to non-software cultural production through the array of Creative Commons licenses (Bollier, 2008). The accomplishments of this movement have been remarkable; copyleft practices have insinuated themselves into the modus operandi of the mainstream tech industry, creating many billions of dollars worth of freely available, world-class software in the process.

The tradition of hacking intellectual-property law, however, has not extended to the challenge of hacking corporate structure and corporate profits; as a result, there has been a disconnect between production, governance and ownership. The terminology of ‘open source’, which emerged about a decade after Stallman’s GPL, advertised collaborative code-sharing as an opportunity for low-cost, crowdsourced corporate innovation. Many of the large open-source projects now operate through foundations guided and funded by corporations that benefit from the community-developed code. Google, for instance, has been able to redeploy the open-source Linux kernel as Android, the world’s most popular mobile operating system, which also happens to be an effective tool for transmitting lucrative user data to the company’s proprietary databases.

The leading online peer-production communities, like Wikipedia and Linux, have also remained troublingly homogeneous, with low rates of participation among women and (at least in the United States) non-white ethnicities. Explanations for this in such communities range from instructive to denialist. But the reality is that those engaged in peer production must either be paid to do so or have surplus leisure time – a surplus that less-privileged populations are less likely to have (Dryden, 2013). By relinquishing ownership of intellectual property to this kind of commons, peer producers may have actually amplified some of the inequalities of the society around them, while allowing corporations to reap the profits. Corporate-led open-source development, too, has cultivated highly sophisticated back-end tools while leaving the features that are user-facing – that is, customer-facing – far less well developed, rendering them unable to compete with commercial counterparts.

Many of platform cooperativism’s early advocates have been advocates, too, of Free Software and the open-source movement. Stallman, as well as Free Software partisan Micky Metts, spoke at the 2015 New School conference. Some insist that platform cooperativism should include a commitment to the exclusive use and production of the GPL and similar licenses. Others in the community have embraced a new generation of intellectual-property hacks specifically attuned to corporate ownership design as well as the intellectual property itself.

Dmytri Kleiner’s Telekommunist Manifesto (2010) outlined a proposal for a ‘Peer Production License’, which adapted the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license by adding a clause that permits commercial use by worker-owned enterprises that distribute surpluses solely to the worker-owners. If Linux were licensed in this way, Google couldn’t make use of it but a worker-owned company developing mobile devices could. Lost is the mainstreaming effect of corporate adoption, but the value conjured by peer-producers is not so easily captured by capital. Co-ops gain a competitive advantage. The Peer Production License has been promoted by P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens (in Scholz and Schneider, 2016), and the platform co-op Guerrilla Translation has adopted it as a general policy – though it remains marginal and largely untested in practice.

A more restrictive experiment in license innovation is the ‘Co-op Source License’ of the Co-op Source Foundation, a software-development platform co-op.⁹ This license assigns profits from commercialized software to contributors based on “commitment level and peer review.” CoMakery, while not itself a cooperative, is a startup developing a tool for distributing profits in this kind of arrangement with the aid of blockchain technology.

Even without adopting additional restrictions, platform co-ops have sought to develop new strategies for connecting the immense value in the open-software commons with end-users. Snowdrift.coop, for instance, is a cooperative platform designed to provide sustainable financial support for projects that contribute to such commons; platforms like this could incentivize open-source developers to focus more attention on user interfaces that can compete with closed-source alternatives.

Platform cooperativists seek to add a more fair and explicit economic layer to peer-production, prevent corporate value capture and facilitate cooperation among cooperatives. Some of the more restrictive proposals could come at the cost of losing the broad user and contributor base that corporate adoption can offer. Yet each of these experiments represents a plausible innovation in its own right as well as a constructive critique of the Free Software and open-source legacies.

Protocols: No decentralization without representation

Defenders of a free and open Internet also cherish the network’s decentralized design. While working at the RAND Corporation in the 1960s, Paul Baran developed the concept of distributed packet-switching as the basis of a communication system that wouldn’t rely on any single node that could be vulnerable to Soviet attack (Baran, 2002). Despite notable exceptions such as the Domain Name System, this distributed logic pervades the Internet’s protocols. The liberating promise of decentralized networks, in turn, seems to have inclined Internet denizens to seek further liberation through further decentralization. Technologies like peer-to-peer file sharing have allowed users – by relying on no central server – to share copyrighted music and video files without interference from the copyright holders. Platform cooperativism is in a sense a call for decentralization as well, in particular the decentralization of ownership.

The Internet as many people experience it has become remarkably centralized. They gain access through the monopolistic broadband providers that have replaced the small-scale, local ISPs that were common in the days of dial-up (although some regions co-own their broadband through cooperative utilities). Much of their online lives takes place through a small number of monolithic companies such as Facebook and Google – which track browsing habits through cookies, embedded buttons and mobile surveillance. But decentralization is also undergoing a revival, as early Internet architects like Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle call for re-decentralizing the Web.¹⁰ These initiatives seek to challenge the centralized platforms with a new generation of decentralized protocols. The cryptographic blockchain technology that enabled the Bitcoin digital currency system, meanwhile, makes possible a bewildering array of decentralized possibilities, from a replacement for the Domain Name System (e.g., Namecoin) to ‘distributed autonomous organizations’ made of ‘smart contracts’ (e.g., Ethereum). Advocates revel in the ambition of a ‘trustless’ ‘decentralized society’ that cryptography will allegedly enable (Frank, 2015). And in many respects the promise is real.

Bitcoin, however, has become a cautionary tale. While the underlying cryptography has held up according to spec, the social outcomes are less encouraging. Wealth distribution in the Bitcoin economy is massively stratified – much more so than in the conventional economy – and a small cabal of ‘mining’ pools have come to dominate the creation of new coins and the governance of the system. In effect, Bitcoin has become centralized yet ungovernable.

The urge to decentralize and distribute authority across networks risks neglecting the necessary work of reconstituting that authority in democratic ways. But decentralization and democracy can go hand in hand, too. For some years now, federated social networks like Diaspora, Friendica and GNU Social have implemented features familiar to users of Facebook and Twitter through decentralized networks of independently owned and governed nodes. I am a member of the ‘democratic membership organization’ May First/People Link, which finances, owns and manages a GNU Social node; my data for the network is managed, therefore, by an organization accountable to me, while enabling me to interact freely with the global network. This model, while less lucrative for investors than a centralized social network, is well suited to democratic organizations. Scale occurs through the protocol, not the platform.

The democratic potential of blockchain technologies, also, is considerable – even if it has rarely prevailed in practice. While Ethereum smart contracts could implement a digital autocracy governed by an absolute monarch or an unaccountable robot, they’re just as capable of facilitating highly democratic structures. Some projects have turned to cooperative models to solve problems that vex other blockchain systems; Rchain uses a co-op as a means of scalability, while Moeda turns to credit unions as partners for expanding financial inclusion.

To those who regard decentralization as a liberatory end in itself, platform cooperativism adds the qualification that having a decentralized system doesn’t remove the challenge of governance – it just alters where and how governance takes place. For decentralization to have democratic consequences, it needs democratic design.

Finance: Rent capital, don’t be rented by it

Some assume that cooperatives are incompatible with large-scale financing, that they must forego the growth and innovation that investor ownership enables. A glance at the global cooperative sector, however, belies this. It is true that cooperatives cannot cede the powers of governance and ownership that investors typically expect, but in areas where co-ops have flourished, they have formed quite formidable financial institutions – such as credit unions and cooperative banks – to hold capital and make it available to the sector for growth. José María Arizmendiarrieta, founder of the Mondragon Corporation, insisted that co-ops have a responsibility to capitalize: ‘A cooperativism without the structural ability to attract and assimilate capital at the level of the demands of industrial productivity is a transitory solution, an obsolete formula’ (2013).

Rather than ruling out the possibility of financing, cooperative models require a different kind of ownership design in their financing schemes than businesses that invite investor control. Thus far, however, the online economy has relied on a venture-capital investment model based on granting considerable rights to early investors, followed by an eventual ‘exit’ through either selling the company to another company or trading shares on speculative markets. For platform cooperativism to take hold as a live option for enterprises, other designs are needed.

Loomio is a New Zealand-based worker co-op that produces a popular online decision-making platform. Venture capital was not an option, and the team members considered adopting non-profit status, but found it incompatible with their ambitions for scale. By early 2016, however, they had raised a round of $450,000 from investors who supported their mission and regarded their worker-owned structure as adequate assurance. The investors purchased non-voting, redeemable-preference shares, assuring a return based on the company’s revenue without compromising its cooperative model. While the investment remains a modest one by Silicon Valley standards, it beckons toward more sizable promise.

Cooperatives were, in a sense, the original crowdfunding, allowing communities to self-fund enterprises that served them. And while online crowdfunding has been an effective enabler of new initiatives, it lacks the shared ownership of co-ops. New platforms want to bring that back. Seedbloom is building an blockchain-based equity crowdfunding tool, enabling contributors to become co-owners of the projects they support; it has already helped enable the development of Resonate, a cooperative music-streaming platform owned by fans, musicians, and labels. Open Collective, while not a cooperative, is a crowdfunding tool that enables groups to form online cooperatives and manage their budgets without need for formal incorporation or a bank account. Tools like these can help significantly lower the barriers to co-op formation.

A vibrant platform co-op sector will require a variety of financing mechanisms. Purpose Ventures is an emerging investment firm designed from the start to specialize in ‘self-owned’, ‘purpose driven’ companies that seek sustainable growth, not a rapid exit; as the companies grow, their success enables new companies to join a mutually supporting ecosystem. FairCoop is attempting to create a global cooperative financial system with several concurrent mechanisms, including its own cryptocurrency, a mutual-credit network, a savings service and a variety of mission-driven funds.

A further source for platform co-op investment is the existing offline cooperative sector. While some large, well-capitalized co-ops have begun investing in platforms, they often face a learning curve in doing so. Just as the tech sector has yet to learn what it takes to systematically develop co-ops, the cooperative sector must learn how to apply its financial resources and know-how online. One promising approach may be to forge collaborations between successful tech accelerators and cooperative financial institutions.

What unites these various forms of cooperative-friendly financing is how they reverse the conventional corporate model, in which capital rents workers’ time and seeks to extract profit from customers. In co-ops, online and off, participants find capital when they need it and rent it without relinquishing their business in exchange.

Education: Train owners, not just workers

The promotion of education has been a pillar of cooperative enterprise at least since the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers’ famous store in mid-nineteenth-century England, and it remains a basic principle for the global cooperative movement. Business shapes the people who engage in it as an implicit education; cooperativism seeks to make that education explicit, and to educate members as informed, empowered stewards and owners. Some of the world’s most important co-op networks, including the Mondragon Corporation and the Antigonish movement in Nova Scotia, grew out of schools. It is an irony of Silicon Valley’s history that Leland Stanford, founder of the tech industry’s flagship university, was a passionate advocate of cooperative enterprise and included in his Grant of Endowment a directive ‘to have taught in the University the right and advantages of association and co-operation’; it’s an intention that the university, and the tech industry it helped spawn, has largely ignored (Altenberg, 1990).

In Scholz and Schneider (2016), a chapter by Karen Gregory asks in its title, ‘Can Tech Schools Go Cooperative?’ By ‘tech schools’, she refers to the recent proliferation of unaccredited, often for-profit ‘bootcamps’ that offer intensive curricula designed to produce students ready for well-paying jobs for software companies in a matter of only weeks or months. Gregory proposes, instead, a kind of tech school that sets the bar higher, to ownership: ‘a curriculum that explores the possibilities of new forms of collectivities, organizing and worker agency’. Gregory calls for locating such schools in public universities, for the sake of accessibility for populations currently underrepresented in tech jobs. New programs in cooperative business at public institutions – such as the City University of New York and Laney College, a community college in Oakland, California – are currently in development, but by and large their orientation is toward offline cooperatives.

A model partly along the lines Gregory describes, meanwhile, has emerged through the New Zealand-based cooperative network Enspiral, which is home, among other enterprises, to Loomio. In 2014 members of the network formed Enspiral Dev Academy, a coding school that equips students with marketable skills while also introducing them to the opportunities for co-ownership in Enspiral itself. The academy offers scholarships and priority for applicants from underrepresented populations (as some more conventional tech schools do as well). Likewise outside the sphere of public education, the educational arms of cooperatives like Mondragon Corporation and Co-operatives UK offer distance-learning programs that could prefigure platform co-op models for massive open online courses (MOOCs) and the like.

Whether in public or private forms, education will be an essential component of a platform co-op sector. Some of the most important education likely takes place through the platforms themselves, in the ways by which a platform presents itself to members as a medium of co-ownership and elicits from them responsible decision-making and stewardship.

Governance: Kumbaya won’t do

In co-ops and investor-owned companies alike, shared governance can turn into a caricature. Those with limited experience in the cooperative sector might assume that just because an enterprise is, say, legally owned by its workers, cumbersome consensus-based processes must be the norm. And in companies where the workers are not owners, managers might try similarly cumbersome performances to instill a fictional ‘sense of ownership’ intended to encourage more productive behaviors. Platform cooperativism has challenged both versions of superficial communalism by seeking to align appropriate ownership and governance structures rather than hiding one behind the other.

The task of efficiently balancing the stakeholdership relationships of the platform economy is far from straightforward. Traditional lines that distinguish worker-owned, consumer-owned, or producer-owned co-ops tend to blur in a platform economy where much of a platform’s value comes from the contributions and resources of people who are not the company’s employees. Many emerging platform co-ops have opted for multi-stakeholder models that encompass various classes of co-owners, such as employees, users and customers. The FairShares model, for instance, is a recent effort to facilitate and codify a multi-stakeholder structure. Platform co-ops like Loconomics, Resonate and Stocksy United use multi-stakeholder structures for both ownership and governance.

There are lessons to be drawn from the distributed governance models of foregoing tech culture. Open-source software communities have developed sophisticated governance practices, ranging from the formality of the Debian Constitution, which manages a popular version of Linux, to the free-for-all of an IRC channel. These hackers’ commitment to transparency, also, can offer correctives to a cooperative movement that has too often been opaque, even to its members. Holacracy and sociocracy are governance structures that conventional companies have used to distribute authority and empower employees; they’re even better suited to cooperative models in which that empowerment extends to ownership of the company itself.

Experiments that have emerged from civic and political innovation have proved useful for economic democracy, too. Loomio – which translated the decision making processes of Wellington, New Zealand’s 2011 Occupy encampment into a platform – serves as a primary governance tool for Enspiral and other co-ops worldwide, along with schools, government programs and businesses. The ‘liquid democracy’ model pioneered among alternative political parties in Europe and South America could be well-suited for large-scale platform co-ops.

There is potential for governance, also, in the now-reflexive daily practices of online platforms – Facebook ‘likes’, Reddit ‘upvotes’ and so forth. These features of user experience could become the rudiments of meaningful shared governance. If this were the case, we might see a reduction in the often careless behavior found on social media. Could the Reddit uprising of 2015, which ousted a CEO, have proceeded more constructively if Reddit users had levers for self-governance besides conspiring to shut down the platform?

Not every wheel of governance must be reinvented. For all the radical governance models on offer, platform co-ops need not necessarily reject every practice that conventional platform companies already employ – while retaining the significant difference that the managers are ultimately accountable not to outside investors but to the platforms’ actual participants, as well as to the communities in which participants live.

Policy: Local value for local benefit and control

Confronting the platform economy’s onrush of disruptions, policymakers have found themselves in the position of trying to say ‘no’, in various and sometimes futile ways, as they attempt to retain appropriate control over their economic infrastructures. Ride-sharing platforms destabilize structures for taxi regulation, and room-renting platforms unsettle tourism policies. Both bypass established compromises in labor relations. Industries that were once more or less locally governed and owned are now orchestrated from the platforms’ headquarters far away – and those platforms’ investors insist on taking a sizable cut. Platform cooperativism gestures toward a new set of options to consider, toward something policymakers can say ‘yes’ to.

Co-ops have long represented this kind of constructive alternative, and in many parts of the world their flourishing has been made possible through proactive policy. In the United States, for instance, the Department of Agriculture provided grants and loans for the creation of electric utility co-ops in rural areas that investor-owned companies opted not to electrify, starting in the 1930s; today, federal agencies have begun helping some of those same co-ops offer user-owned broadband service. Co-ops are a tool not only for meeting needs that capital markets fail to meet, but for doing so justly, in a way that keeps wealth among the constituencies that create it. To this effect, Michel Bauwens and others have theorized the ‘partner state’ as a framework for governments that enable, but do not control or direct, the flourishing of cooperative and commons-oriented enterprise (Kostakis and Bauwens, 2014). The city of Barcelona has taken early steps to enshrine platform cooperativism into its economic strategies. And in August 2016, UK Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn issued a ‘Digital Democracy Manifesto’ that included ‘platform cooperatives’ among its eight planks.

In her statement for the 2015 Platform Cooperativism conference,¹¹ New York City Council member Maria del Carmen Arroyo wrote, ‘Worker cooperatives offer a viable method to address the long-term challenge of reducing the number of chronically unemployed and underemployed residents and the number of workers trapped in low-paying jobs’. To this end, she had already supported legislation to fund worker-cooperative development in the city, as well as steps toward preferential treatment for co-ops in city infrastructure contracting. She added that platform cooperativism ‘can put the public in greater control of the Internet, which can often feel like an abyss we are powerless over’. Another City Council member, Ben Kallos, made a last-minute appearance at the conference to announce his proposal for a ‘Universal E-Hail App’ with an open protocol that would level the competition between taxis and ride-sharing drivers.

Taking the example of the accommodations-rental platform Airbnb, Janelle Orsi has proposed three kinds of cooperative alternatives, outlining a distinct role for government in the ownership design of each (Schneider, 2015a). What she calls ‘Co-bnb’ would be a co-op owned by the renters of rooms in a given area; ‘Munibnb’ would be owned and operated by cities as a public good, enabling them to set controls and caps on short-term rentals; similarly city-managed, ‘Allbnb’ would add the principle of redirecting the profits from the platform back to residents as dividends, recognizing the fact that, when visitors come, their hosts are all the city’s residents, not just those from whom they rent a room.

Such municipal ownership models have been pioneered by so-called ‘sharing cities’ such as Seoul, South Korea, which has restricted certain platforms while promoting the development of local alternatives. Municipal ownership is not strictly cooperative – it violates the cooperative principle of ‘autonomy and independence’, among others – but this approach recognizes that, as stewards of common infrastructure, governments are essential stakeholders in the platform economies that rely on such infrastructure to operate.

When a business serves the role of organizing and enabling the transactions throughout an entire sector of the economy, it has historically been regarded as either a monopoly or a public utility. Just as the monopolies of connective railroads inspired the U.S. antitrust laws of a century ago, a recognition is growing that new strategies of enforcement, and perhaps new laws, are needed to regulate the emerging online super-platforms (Khan, 2016). Enabling transitions to more democratic ownership designs may be a way to help these platforms better self-regulate, rather than inviting more stifling regulatory regimes.

Designing for the future

Cooperatives have often formed from a posture of reaction, of meeting unmet and essential needs, rather than anticipating desires or advertising them into existence. The growing movement for platform cooperativism, too, has tended toward imagining co-op versions of existing models, rather than wholesale innovations. While conservatism can be a strength and a source of stability, it will also be a liability in an evolving online economy of capital-rich enterprises competing for winner-take-all market share. Leading offline cooperatives have made a point of investing in innovation, and platform co-ops will need to do so all the more. To this end, Trebor Scholz has formed the Platform Cooperativism Consortium at The New School to orchestrate research and funding specifically for this emerging sector. The Internet of Ownership maintains a library of legal templates and bylaws. And research initiatives like the EU’s P2Pvalue project are starting to incorporate platform cooperativism into their work as well. Such efforts face plentiful challenges.

Among the most visible platform co-ops in development, for instance, are cooperative taxi companies vying to compete with the likes of Uber. Companies like Green Taxi Cooperative in Denver, Alpha Taxis in Paris and ATX Coop Taxi in Austin are betting that they can provide better service with drivers fully committed to their work through various degrees of equity sharing, combined with their own app-based hailing technology. In the short term this strategy may have promise. However, Uber’s longer-term outlook appears to be premised on an eventual transition to self-driving cars – and an economy in which human driver-owners could turn into a cumbersome liability.

The question at hand, really: How do we cooperativize robots? It’s a challenge for domains well beyond transportation. The ‘internet of things’ – the growing industry of automated, networked gadgets, from watches to home temperature controls – poses problems of trust and surveillance that cooperative ownership could be especially well suited for, but only if they move into that new market quickly enough. Platform co-op researchers need to investigate more deliberately what potential innovations and business models investor-owned companies aren’t seeing because of the limitations of their own ownership structures.

Matters of intellectual property ownership take on fresh urgency as people invite artificial intelligence more fully into their lives through systems like Amazon’s Alexa. Silicon Valley titans Elon Musk and Sam Altman, among others, have formed an organization called OpenAI to develop open-source artificial intelligence technoloegy, but, as with open-source software generally, this does not prevent value from flowing mainly to corporate investors. Peter Barnes (2006), on the other hand, has suggested that those who monetize our information commons could pay fees that would be redistributed equally to the population in the form of a universal dividend. And a team of computer scientists has proposed a preliminary model for artificial intelligence owned by the people whose data-labor trains it (Sriraman et al., 2017). The nature of democratic ownership design for a more automated future is by no means obvious, but investor control need not be a foregone conclusion.

Finally, an honest platform cooperativism should extend its gaze beyond the platform economy itself to its material substrates – in particular, the human conditions surrounding the mineral extraction and assembly of the hardware on which platforms depend. This has been neglected territory for the emerging platform co-op ecosystem, which has remained software-oriented. But there are some promising points of departure to consider. Fairphone is a Dutch smartphone, available in Britain through The Phone Co-op; it is designed with an ethical supply chain in mind, including decent working conditions and conflict-free minerals. The Indonesian co-op KDIM is building its own locally produced smartphone. In China, Huawei, the world’s largest telecommunications hardware manufacturer, is significantly employee-owned – though it is neither a formal co-op nor a model for worker rights. Perhaps platform co-ops, by building other co-ops into their supply chains, can help set high standards for sourcing and labor. Further research is needed, however, to develop more democratic ownership designs for the hardware, natural resources and human labor on which any future platform economy will depend.

Ownership transitions

What would it take to have an economy in which a can-do entrepreneur with an idea for a platform – the kind of person who wants nothing more than to create something new and excellent and receive some fair compensation for succeeding – will conclude that her best way to proceed is by practicing democracy? The answer, of course, is that it would take a lot of things at once. Ownership design is best considered a process of open-ended choices, based on patterns that we test and apply iteratively. Integral to the designs themselves, therefore, are the processes for instantiating them.

There are two basic kinds of co-op development: startups and conversions. Startups that begin as co-ops from their inception have the chance to hard-wire cooperative values into their structures and cultures; they typically rely on the widespread recognition of an unmet need. Conversion, meanwhile, involves transitioning an existing enterprise to democratic ownership and governance, combining a proven business model and its existing momentum with a structure better aligned to serve the people who rely on it.

Startups might come in several forms. Some will be bootstrapped – drawing on existing communities of users to finance and populate a platform that meets their needs, perhaps through equity crowdfunding. Along these lines, venture capitalist Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures envisions a new generation of less risky ‘skinny platforms’ that deliver lower returns to investors and higher returns to labor. He told Shareable in 2015, ‘We can generate a return participating in that, and we think that’s what we should be doing’ (Geraci, 2015). Other kinds of startups, meanwhile, might spin off from existing cooperatives, online or off, perhaps connected by a federation or other forms of ongoing cooperation. For instance, the German cooperative marketplace platform Fairmondo is spreading to the UK through the aid of two existing cooperatives – Fairmondo itself and Worth Cooperating in the UK – with the intention of creating a freestanding multi-stakeholder co-op. Rather than growing as a multinational company, they’re replicating and sharing a common pool of open-source software.

Conversions, too, can come in various forms. One is a mature-stage transition. Especially when a product is unproven or lacks a ready community of users, a cooperative structure may not be the appropriate ownership design early on; it makes sense, then, that forward-thinking founders and investors should hold the risk, as well as the opportunity for reward. Once a community of users forms, however, the nature of the business changes, and cooperative ownership models become more appropriate – such as to govern labor policies or the use of personal data. A loyal and active community can provide founders with a fair return for their early innovation and investment; shared ownership, meanwhile, can help keep that community loyal and active and interested in their platform’s success. Another kind of conversion – more speculative and challenging, to be sure – could take place once a platform has achieved the sort of ubiquity that makes it, in essence, a monopoly-utility. For instance, as former Harvard Library director Robert Darnton contends (2009 and elsewhere), Google Books has created a unique and essential information commons by scanning and making available documents that may never be scanned again; a company whose chief responsibility is shareholder profit, however, does not seem to be the appropriate steward for an archive of such immesurable value. Similar concerns in the platform co-op networks have spurred a ‘BuyTwitter’ campaign, which calls on the company to convert to some form of user ownership. A new generation of antitrust policy might finance and aid transfers of platform ownership to the users who depend on them. Cooperative models are both proven and adaptive enough to merit consideration as we design and adopt – so far with too little foresight – the platform utilities of the twenty-first-century economy.

The extent of platform cooperativism at present remains limited to a rallying cry, a few success stories, and a cluster of far-flung, early-stage experiments. Merely saying that it should take hold more widely, as we advocates have attempted to do, is not enough to overcome the formidable barriers of financing, market access, public education and competition that this kind of model faces. Even a brief glance at the existing, offline cooperative economy – the credit unions, the electric utility co-ops, the farmers’ marketing and supply firms – makes clear that a more cooperative online economy would not guarantee utopian outcomes. But the achievements of past co-op sectors do at least suggest that such models are capable of scaling to reach and shape significant portions of economic life. When they do so, they furnish more resilient, institutionally diverse societies, impacting the behavior of non-cooperative enterprises as well as the lives of their members.

Insofar as platform cooperativism has been a scholarly project, it introduces questions that have been too often neglected in research on internet cultures and economies. How are platforms owned and governed, and how could they be owned and governed differently? How does their ownership shape the platforms’ structures of accountability? How do ownership models organize and limit the kinds of technologies available to people?

Thankfully, this has not been merely a scholarly project, but a participatory one. The emerging experiments have not merely followed the path called for or imagined by theory. That dynamism only reinforces the supposition, however, that when we reorient systems of ownership and governance toward democracy, transformative things can occur.

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Photo by Photographing Travis

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MJ Kaplan: The future of jobs, work, and workplaces is facing rampant transformation. One of the most visible changes has been the rising number of contract workers, who, according to the Freelancers’ Union, number 57.3 million people in the US. That’s 36 percent of all workers! If current trends continue, by 2027, contract workers will outnumber wage workers nationally.

These 57 million freelancers benefit from some aspects of on-demand arrangements, such as flexible schedules. But the negative consequences of the gig economy often overshadow the positives. Contract workers face fewer protections, low pay, lack of job security, and no benefits. For example, the Freelancers’ Union notes that 63 percent of contract workers have to dip into their savings at least once a month, compared to 20 percent of wage workers.

Amid this upheaval, platform cooperatives are emerging as a new type of enterprise. These startups build on the positive heritage of more than 100 years of cooperatives, with a deeply human-centered ethos, and leverage platform technology for scale and sustainability. Stakeholders—users, employees, and other members—govern the company and share in the success.

Platform co-ops are forming in response to formidable platform monopolies. In the West, Google controls search, Facebook and Twitter rule social media, and Amazon leads in e-commerce. You’re probably also familiar with ridesharing services, which are dominated by Uber and Lyft. As Nick Srnicek writes in the Guardian , “Data is quickly becoming the 21st-century version of oil—a resource essential to the entire global economy, and the focus of intense struggle to control it. Platforms, as spaces in which two or more groups interact, provide what is in effect an oilrig for data.”

Platform co-ops offer a mechanism by which users co-own and govern these companies, providing a means for users to protect their data judiciously rather than exploit it through algorithms to maximize profits. Not every algorithm is problematic, of course; most of us, for example, prefer to have private data extracted in order to be informed of traffic tie-ups. But, a platform co-op makes it possible to subject the decisions that are made about when and how to use private data to democratic control.

Platform co-ops also provide a way to share the wealth generated by the data. For example, Uber drivers in Great Britain barely earn more than the minimum wage , yet Uber itself has a market capitalization of close to $70 billion . Presumably, because the profits generated in a driver-owned Uber would accrue to the drivers themselves, a driver-owned Uber would share the wealth far more equitably than an Uber controlled by venture capital investors.

Cooperatives are largely misunderstood, even though they contribute substantially to the economy and to communities. A 2009 study estimated that 30,000 US cooperatives account for nearly $654 billion in revenue. More than 120 million Americans are also member-owners of a co-op, most commonly of a credit union or electric co-op. Yet only 11 percent of respondents could define basic elements of a co-op, according to a 2015 survey .

Fundamentally, cooperatives are businesses owned and run by and for their members. Whether customers, employees, or residents, members have an equal say in what the business does and a share in the profits. Cooperatives work in a variety of sectors and range from neighborhood-based, such as a children’s preschool or grocery store, to multinational.

Many co-ops are major players in their industries. For instance, roughly 900 electric cooperatives in 47 states provide service to over 42 million people. Because electric co-ops are concentrated in rural areas, electric co-op distribution lines provide power to regions that cover almost three-quarters of the nation’s landmass. These companies actively support their communities in addition to providing safe, affordable and reliable power.

Another sector where US co-ops are highly prominent is credit unions, where over 5,000 not-for-profit credit unions serve 112 million member-owners, with assets totaling $1.38 trillion. Cooperatives are often more resilient than traditional businesses in part because of strong relationships with their users. Ace Hardware , the world’s largest hardware retail cooperative, grew to 5,000 locations in 60 countries this year at a time when most brick-and-mortar retailers are facing stalling sales, declining stores, and layoffs.

The founders of platform co-ops are designing alternatives to firms like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit (purchased recently by Ikea). Uber may be the poster child for digital market disrupters that are swirling in controversy. These controversies include toxic cultures marked by rampant sexual harassment, as well as additional harmful and illegal practices , such as skirting labor regulations and insurance requirements. Uber has been criticized for its poor treatment of contract labor, employees, and customers, along with its negative impact on local communities.

Infused with massive venture capital, these firms seem to pursue skyrocketing growth at all cost. In contrast, platform co-ops aim to reinvest in their users, employees, and communities, and value positive workplace practices in tandem with profitability. Getting platform cooperatives to scale will not be easy, however. Deep-pocketed firms like Uber have raised billions of dollars and have a first-mover advantage. Moreover, one of the biggest challenges with platforms is that name recognition is highly powerful and there is a tendency toward monopoly.

That said, a growing number of grassroots efforts around the globe are challenging this dynamic. For example, Modo is a car-sharing platform cooperative in Vancouver, British Columbia, with 19,000 members. According to board member William Azaroff, Modo is transforming communities by connecting people with places in a way that is affordable, convenient, inclusive and sustainable. Azaroff spoke at The Platform Cooperativism Consortium’s 3rd annual conference at The New School in New York City in November. Approximately 350 participants from more than 15 countries gathered to share and amplify the value of platform co-ops for workers and sustainable communities.

Homecare workers and cleaners are some of the lowest paid workers, with few rights or protections. Up & Go is a site that promotes and schedules on-demand quality cleaning services for several women-owned cooperative businesses. Workers earn $4–5 more dollars per hour than other cleaning-industry workers in the area and retain 95 percent of the income they generate. The workers can build equity as owners, in addition to earning a fair wage. The software platform amplifies the network’s marketing and streamlines customer support.

According to Nithin Coca, writing in Sharable , Up and Go got off the ground with the assistance of multiple grants, including “one from the Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit based in New York City that focuses on fighting poverty, and another from the citizenship initiatives program of the multinational British bank Barclays .” According to Sylvia Morse, Up & Go’s project coordinator, “The impetus for launching Up & Go came from our understanding of the marketing challenges facing worker co-ops—along with the Robin Hood Foundation’s research and focus on the impact of the digital gig economy on low-income workers.”

Unions are also playing an important role to support platform cooperatives. Abby Solomon, a union organizer, spoke at the conference about Carina , a nonprofit online platform that connects low-income seniors and people with disabilities with union represented caregivers in Washington state. The project is a partnership between SEIU 775 and the State of Washington. In California, United Health Workers West helped nurses launch the NursesCan Cooperative , a platform for licensed vocational nurses to provide on-demand care options for health care providers.

Another health care startup is Savvy Cooperative, created by two founders who live with chronic illness. This marketplace connects healthcare innovators and researchers with patients so they can work collaboratively to co-create meaningful patient-centered solutions. Jen Horonjeff, Savvy founder, explains why they chose a co-op structure:

Savvy’s mission is to elevate the patient voice and ensure that patients are fairly valued for their contributions to new innovations. We practice this ourselves as a co-op. By allowing patients to become co-owners, it gives them a vote and share of our profits. We believe this encourages a larger and stronger network of motivated patients, which will better amplify the patient voice in the healthcare industry.

Stocksy United is a stock photo platform cooperative founded in 2012 and based in Victoria, British Columbia. Photographers may seem like they have little in common with homecare workers, but they too face challenges getting work and fair prices. Quality is a hallmark of Stocksy’s success; according to Nuno Silva, its Vice President of Product, Stocksy has nearly 1,000 contributing artists who earned $4.9 million in royalties based on revenues of $10.7 million in 2016. A substantial startup loan was instrumental to jump-start this growth. The cooperative structure provides the foundation to run an ethical, sustainable business that is made stronger by its member-shareholders, according to Silva.

Access to capital is another major challenge facing platform cooperatives. The novelty requires a great deal of education among investors, attorneys and other key players. I experienced this challenge personally in my work with the social enterprise Loomio , a worker-owned cooperative that is a platform for collaborative decision-making. Impact investors were enthusiastic about our mission, values, and prospects for growth. But they were unfamiliar with cooperative structure. So, we needed to educate prospective investors. This cultivation resulted in $460,000 investment in 2016. Loomio’s progress benefitted from the maturing social enterprise sector that has nurtured enabling systems such as policies, legal options and investment. The ecosystem for platform co-ops is nascent, so pioneer founders must overcome many barriers.

Do these startups have a chance for breakout success? If Mara Zepeda has her say, they will. Zepeda, co-founder and CEO of Switchboard, instigated Zebras Unite , a grassroots cooperative movement to change the narrative by funding an ecosystem for purpose-driven startups like platform cooperatives. “Zebra” companies differ fundamentally from Silicon Valley “unicorns”—private startups valued at $1 billion or more. Zebras, mostly founded by women and people of color, favor quality over quantity, reward creation over consumption, and seek sustainable growth over quick exits. Zebras are about repair, not disruption.

Zepeda and her allies aim to remedy the astonishing reality that a mere three percent of venture funding goes to women and less than one percent to people of color. The Zebra network gathered recently at DazzleCon in Portland, Oregon to galvanize the movement to create alternative business models that will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. The Zebra network is committed to create a more just and responsible society. These companies will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.

Trebor Scholz, a New School associate professor and host of the November conference, writes that, “[Platform Cooperatives] can be a reminder that work can be dignified rather than diminishing for the human experience. Cooperatives are not a panacea for all the wrongs of platform capitalism. But they could help to weave some ethical threads into the fabric of 21st-century work.”

This article was originally published by Nonprofit Quarterly.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published with edits to style and grammar. It was updated on January 8, 2018 to reflect how it originally appeared on nonprofitquarterly.org.

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