ICDE Fellows’ Work in 2025

In 2025, ICDE Fellows produced influential research linking cooperative digital economies, AI, and data governance to worker-led institutional change across academia, policy, and practice.

Several Fellows shaped global conversations on technology and political economy through high-visibility venues. Contributions included analysis published by the World Economic Forum on AI governance and economic transformation, alongside a peer-reviewed article in Globalizations examining AI development and labor conditions in Latin America. Other Fellows affiliated with the National Centre for Scientific Research published foundational research on cooperative data centers, outlining both their democratic promise and structural constraints within existing digital infrastructures. One fellow offered the first large-scale, empirical mapping of platform cooperatives, clarifying key definitions and identifying their core characteristics and shared legal, financial, governance, and market challenges.

Fellows published research on explainable AI, cooperative data stewardship, and social-economy governance, including work conducted in collaboration with Mondragon. Policy-oriented Fellows contributed to major reports on democratic data governance, including A Vision for the Democracy Data Space, and served as lead authors or contributors to InternetLab policy analyses shaping interpretation of Brazil’s data protection and platform regulation frameworks.

Several projects bridged research and practice directly. Fellows published research on community currencies and solidarity finance in Brazil, and in Spain, examining democratic innovation through confrontation and institutional transformation. Others analyzed domestic work platforms in India, foregrounding gender, mediation, and power in platformized labor systems. One paper examined the barriers to community-led innovation while another focused on an ubun-tu cooperative model.Legal and policy research also extended to housing, with Fellows contributing to the International Legal Research & Analysis Initiative’s 2025 report on cooperative housing. One fellow focused on rethinking platform technologies through the lens of moral values and politics.

Applied experimentation featured prominently as well. Fellows participated in the development and analysis of Data Lifeboat, a program exploring content mobility and preservation for digital cultural heritage, and examined organizational strategies for exploring how worker voice is shaping AI adoption and job quality in telecom and gaming occupations at Cornell’s ILR School. Case-based research on worker ownership also appeared in national reports, including analysis of the Drivers Cooperative–Colorado in The Practice and Promise of Social Cooperatives.

Public scholarship and cultural intervention were equally central to Fellows’ work. One Fellow published a widely read interview examining how a former dominatrix creates tech to prevent and deter non-consensual image sharing for the BBC. Others contributed organizing-oriented essays such as Building Community Power to Take Back Our Data, and authored book-length research on cooperative business models oriented toward the common good, sustainability, and democratic transformation.

This body of work demonstrates how ICDE Fellows operate from local experimentation to global policy arenas while maintaining a shared focus on cooperative ownership, democratic governance, and social justice in digital systems.