Platform cooperative
A platform cooperative, or platform co-op, is a cooperatively owned, democratically governed business that establishes a two-sided market via a computing platform, website, mobile app or a protocol to facilitate the sale of goods and services. Platform cooperatives are an alternative to venture capital-funded platforms insofar as they are owned and governed by those who depend on them most—workers, users, and other relevant stakeholders.
Platform Cooperativism is an intellectual framework and movement which advocates for the global development of platform cooperatives. Its advocates object to the techno-solutionist claim that technology is, by default, the answer to all social problems. Rather, proponents of the movement claim that ethical commitments such as the building of the global commons, support of inventive unions, and promotion of ecological and social sustainability as well as social justice, are necessary to shape an equitable and fair social economy. Platform cooperativism advocates for the coexistence of cooperatively owned business models and traditional, extractive models with the goal of a more diversified digital labor landscape respecting fair working conditions.
Platform cooperativism is not exactly about digital disintermediation, since a coop, which is a legally constituted moral entity, owns the digital platform. It is different from platform corporations like Uber, in that the governance of the digital platform is democratic. There are some similarities with the peer-to-peer production movement, influenced by Michel Bauwens and the P2P Foundation, which advocates for "new kinds of democratic and economic participation" as far as it is concerned with "the free participation of equal partners, engaged in the production of common resources". Economically and institutionally it is more distant from the radically distributed, non-market mechanisms of commons-based peer production promoted by Yochai Benkler., although they share some ethical considerations. Marjorie Kelly's book Owning Our Future contributed the distinction between democratic and extractive ownership design to this discussion.
While platform cooperatives are structured as cooperatives, granting democratic control to workers, customers, users, or other key stakeholders, companies and initiatives that support the ecosystem of the cooperative platform economy are considered a part of the platform cooperativism movement insofar as they attempt to encourage, develop, and sustain its development. It has also been argued that, as the spread of platform cooperativism "will require a different kind of ecosystem—with appropriate forms of finance, law, policy, and culture—to support the development of democratic online enterprises".
Typology
While there is no commonly accepted typology of platform cooperatives, researchers often categorize platform cooperatives by industry. Some potential categories include: transportation, on-demand labor, journalism, music, creative projects, timebank, film, home health care, photography, data cooperatives, marketplaces. Other typologies differentiate platform cooperatives by their governance or ownership structures.Platform cooperatives are a business model that differs from platform capitalism, prioritizing fairness and sharing over profit motive. On the other hand, platform capitalists, such as Airbnb and Uber, are more traditional multi-sided businesses focusing on profit and returns to investors. These can also be referred to as capitalist platforms, while cooperativist platforms prioritize cooperation and fairness in addition to a profit motive.
Projects like Wikipedia, which rely on unpaid labor of volunteers, can be classified as commons-based peer-production initiatives, which are distinct from platform cooperatives since they don't employ the same institutional framework and governance.
Examples
Many platform co-operatives use business models similar to better-known apps or web services, but with a cooperative structure. For example, there are numerous driver-owned taxi apps that allow customers to submit trip requests and notify the nearest driver, similar to Uber.The Internet of Ownership website includes a directory of the platform co-op "ecosystem".
Equal Care Co-op is the UK's first platform-based social care and support co-operative. The platform enables those looking for support to build and manage their own teams, which can include family members, friends and volunteers as well as paid, professional care and support workers. It allows care teams to work together directly, replacing the layers of management that would usually control that support.
Eva is a ride-sharing application that offers a service similar to Uber, but in line with its cooperative members priorities: cheaper for rider members and better wages for driver members.
Fairbnb.coop is an online marketplace and hospitality service for people to lease or rent short-term lodging. Foremost, it is also a community of activists, coders, researchers and designers working to create the platform to enable hosts and guests to connect for travel and cultural exchange, while minimizing the cost to communities. It is an alternative to commercial platforms.
Fairmondo is an online marketplace for ethical goods and services, that originated from Germany and has expanded to the UK. Joining as a stakeholder is open for all and the minimum share is limited to an affordable amount, with stakeholders exercising a democratic control through one-member-one-vote principle. It is a cooperative alternative to Amazon and eBay.
Green Taxi Cooperative is the largest taxi company in the Denver metro area. Organized by the Communications Workers of America Local 7777, its members buy into the cooperative for a one-time membership fee of $2000 and then pay fees amounting to a "fraction" of what large companies charge drivers. Despite having a mobile application through which riders can schedule pickups, and thus competing directly with ride-hailing applications like Uber and Lyft, as of November 2016 the Green Taxi Cooperative reportedly held 37% market share in Denver.
Meet.coop is an open source meeting and conferencing tool.
Midata is a cooperatively owned, Zurich-based, online platform that seeks to serve as an exchange for members' medical data. Using an open-source application, members are able to securely share their medical data with doctors, friends, and researchers, and are provided access to "data analysis, visualization and interpretation tools". Members can also consent to their data's use in medical research and clinical trials. In a pilot project, post-bariatric-surgery patients are able to upload data to the platform, including their weight and daily step count, and follow their own post-surgery progress.
Savvy Cooperative is a multi-stakeholder patient-owned research insights cooperative that seeks to match patients with patient engagement leaders, digital health companies, and clinical innovation leads, enabling industry and start-up tech companies to easily conduct user research with patients to ensure the products that go-to-market are patient-centric and focused on patient needs. Using Savvy's platform, patients can find and apply for gigs that match their conditions, get reimbursed for their participation, and qualify for dividends based on their co-op participation. Savvy is majority patient-owned.
Stocksy United is a platform cooperative headquartered in Victoria, British Columbia. It is a "highly curated collection of royalty-free stock photography and video footage that is 'beautiful, distinctive, and highly usable.'" In 2015, Stocksy earned $7.9 million in sales—doubling its revenues from the year prior—and paid a dividend of $200,000 to its members.
Up & Go is a digital marketplace for professional home services that allows users to schedule services such as house cleaning, dog walking, and handywork with worker-owned businesses that have fair work practices.
Resonate is music streaming coop similar to Spotify.
Collective Tools is a cooperatively owned cloud service that offers storage, communication and canvas boards to organisations as well as storage and email to private persons.
History
The concept developed as part of the traditional struggle between social factions that associate with the left and the right ideologies, the traditional labor vs capital struggle, in the wake of the information age, as the Internet technology introduced the possibility of trans-local participation in economic processes, through digital platforms.The term "platform cooperativism" was coined by New School professor Trebor Scholz in a 2014 article titled, "Platform Cooperativism vs. the Sharing Economy", in which he criticized popular so-called "sharing economy" platforms and called for the creation of democratically controlled cooperative alternatives that "allow workers to exchange their labor without the manipulation of the middleman". Shortly thereafter, journalist Nathan Schneider published an article, "Owning Is the New Sharing", which documented a variety of projects using cooperative models for digitally mediated commerce, as well as online, distributed funding-models which hoped to replace the venture capital model predominant in the technology sector. Both Scholz and Schneider would later credit the work and provocations of other researchers and digital-labor advocates as their inspiration, including, among others, lawyer Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, who had "called on technology companies in the so-called "sharing economy" to share ownership and profits with their users", and Amazon Mechanical Turk organizer Kristy Milland who had proposed a worker-owned alternative to the platform at the "Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades" conference in November 2014.
There are several other precursors to platform cooperativism. In 2012, the Italian cooperative federation Legacoop promulgated a manifesto on the "Cooperative Commons", which called for bringing the lessons of the cooperative movement to control over online data. The same year Mayo Fuster Morell published an article named "horizons of digital commons" in which she pointed to the evolution of commons-based peer production merging with cooperatives and the social economy. The article reflects on an event named Building Digital commons, which took place in October 2011. It was the goal of the event to further connect the cooperative tradition and collaborative production. Other previous similar terms on new forms of cooperativism such as "open cooperativism" and also studies of how the digital environment opens up new possibilities for the cooperative tradition are of relevance to the new term platform cooperativism.
In 2015, Scholz published a primer on platform cooperativism, "Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy", which was published in five languages and helped to internationalize the concept. In 2016, he published Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy, which further developed the concept. Together, Scholz and Schneider went on to convene an event on the subject, "Platform Cooperativism. The Internet. Ownership. Democracy", at The New School in November 2015, and edit a book, Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet.