Platform Coops

Creating A Support System For Platform Cooperatives In Thailand

January 9, 2024 Akkanut Wantanasombut, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, Platform Coops, Thailand, Worker Rights

Since its first proposal in 2014, Platform Cooperativism has evolved into a global movement as an alternative to Platform Capitalism. The concept has been adopted in over 546 known projects across 50 countries. The establishment of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC), serving as a knowledge hub for the global community, marked a significant milestone. PCC fosters inspiration, knowledge, outcomes, and impacts—I am a testament to this, considering myself a small yet integral piece of the evidence. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I enrolled in the online course ‘Platform Co-op Now!’

Platform Co-op School Community Assembly Highlights

February 21, 2023 Trebor Scholz, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, Education, Platform Coops, Worker Rights

Relive the excitement of a packed Community Assembly! Over one hundred attendees gathered as part of Platform Co-op School on Wednesday, February 8, for a themed unconference on shared digital infrastructure. The goal was to bring people together, encourage cross-connections and collaborations, and help reduce the time and resources spent on creating new platforms from scratch. The Community Assembly, facilitated by OwnCo and Start.coop, both part of the PCC Solidarity Collaboratory, involved a brainstorming session to settle on topics including food delivery, public utility co-ops, business-to-business (B2B) platforms, decentralization, stakeholder engagement, the ethics of solidarity at scale, Web3, and energy co-ops.

How To Unlearn Capitalism Through Cooperative Ownership

February 27, 2021 Willa Köerner, Pioneer Works. Create! Cooperatives, Internet, New Economy, Platform Coops

In the context of user-generated content platforms, the coop model is just such a natural fit. One of the principle questions that made a cooperative model feel relevant is this idea of, “Who's generating value, and who's capturing it?” Under capitalism, it’s people with ownership who end up capturing most of the value. So at a base level, sharing ownership with a company’s users and creators can align incentives. And that can dramatically affect the decisions that a platform makes, and steer it in a way that is to the benefit of the people who actually use it and rely on it. What's Spotify valued at, a billion or more? And they’re completely dependent on musicians to make their platform’s content. Lately though, there has been more awareness that this model is not serving its creators. So where coops pop up naturally is when people are like, "I'm not being served."

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