What 2024 Built Together

In 2024, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) highlighted successes such as Spain’s Som Mobilitat, Smart, Canada’s Radish, and the Drivers Cooperatives in Colorado and NYC, showcasing platform cooperatives and adjacent grassroots digital platforms of various sizes and impact, from experiments to viable businesses. The closure of the artist-owned cooperative Ampled also provided valuable lessons about the challenges of governance and market sustainability. New platform cooperatives in Ghana, Tanzania, South Africa, and Iran worked to overcome legal barriers and funding gaps while supporting workers and communities. At the Digital Africa Rising conference in Kenya, participants from 33 countries discussed youth engagement, wage equity, and cooperative governance, building on PCC’s work last year in India to expand the global dialogue.  Through the ICDE Fellowship program, in 2024, researchers from eight countries grappled with global issues such as AI ghost work, climate justice, and governance. For those exploring solutions to inequities in the digital economy, PCC’s work in 2024 provided practical models, a close-knit community, courses, and research that has meaning for practice.

COMMUNITY BUILDING

PCC Conference and ICDE Symposium. In June 2024, the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy (ICDE) at The New School celebrated its fifth anniversary with a global symposium, bringing together researchers and fellows to explore advancements in cooperative digital economies and set the agenda for this growing field.

ICDE at 5 Symposium
In 2024, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium welcomed 10 ICDE Research Fellows from universities across eight countries, including the University of Vigo, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, National University of Quilmes, Cooperative University of Kenya, King’s College London, University of Manchester, Northwestern University, and Cornell University. In one way or another, their research plumbed the intersection between cooperative principles and the digital economy.

This 2024/2025 cohort met monthly to share and discuss their research and also participated in the ICDE’s fifth-anniversary symposium in June in New York City, featuring a keynote by Sasha Costanza-Chock. They also joined the 2024 PCC conference in Kenya, focusing on opportunities to link labor platforms to the repertoire of the Kenyan cooperative movement. Learn more about the 2024/2025 fellows here and the fifth-anniversary symposium here. You can download the program for the ICDE symposium here or get a visual feel of the symposium.

Digital Africa Rising
Merging the annual summit of Kenya’s cooperative movement with the New School’s Platform Cooperativism Consortium (PCC) conference, the Digital Africa Rising event in Mombasa brought together 500 participants from 33 countries and featured 100 speakers to discuss how platform cooperativism and digital innovation could expand opportunities for women and youth while raising wages. Co-hosted by the PCC, the Cooperative University of Kenya, and the Kenyan government, it focused on youth engagement, the role of SACCOs, which are significant with nearly a third of Kenya’s national wealth, and the exploitative practices in global platform work affecting 435 million people worldwide.

Peruse the Digital Africa Rising conference website to learn about all the participants, download the 80-page program PDF, read the programmatic introduction to learn more about the Kenyan cooperative movement and possible ways forward, access the program, check out the photo gallery to get a sense of the flair of the event, binge-watch 45 short video spotlights of participants from 31 countries. If you have time for just 2-3 videos, begin with Kauna Malgwi from Nigeria discussing content moderation, Shaun Pather from South Africa on Wi-Fi cooperatives, and Gulinigaer Yishake from Hong Kong addressing a cooperative courier service Uyghur region in China.

Sifa Chiyoge, Regional Director and CEO of ICA Africa, reflected on the Digital Africa Rising conference by calling for a shift beyond digitization to integrating cooperatives into the digital labor market. In her piece, she highlighted how cooperatives could provide a framework for fairer and more sustainable work conditions in a tech-driven economy. Chiyoge writes:

“As African cooperatives digitize, the need for a more mindful approach to technology integration becomes apparent, ensuring that digital tools don’t inadvertently deepen existing power imbalances or lead to dependency on foreign tech companies.”

Relatedly, read Trebor Scholz’s reflection on Digital Africa Rising, which considers the possibility of an African cooperative for AI content moderators, and Cecilia Muñoz Cancela’s response to the event, focusing on South-South tech collaborations, here and here.

The 2025 PCC Conference, hosted by NeedsMap and convened by Trebor Scholz and Stefano Torticini, will take place in Istanbul from November 11–14, accentuating the crossroads of Asia and Europe while rallying the platform cooperative community from both continents.

Selected PCC Programming at The New School
The PCC programming focused on AI’s hidden labor, cooperatives’ potential for a green and racially just future, and inclusive digital policy. On November 20, 2024, Prof. Mia White, a PCC affiliate faculty member, hosted an event titled What Powers AI? Humans. Featuring James Muldoon and Mark Graham in person, with co-author Callum Cant in absentia, the session explored their book, Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI, which examines the human labor driving artificial intelligence. The discussion was both nuanced and passionate.

Earlier in November, Jerome Warren, editor of The Routledge Handbook of Cooperative Economics and Management, presented a talk titled Why a Green, Resilient, and Racially Just Future Must Be Cooperative. His presentation highlighted the potential of cooperative models to address urgent issues like climate change, inequality, and systemic racism.

Stepping back to September, the Platform Cooperativism Consortium hosted Open Dialogue: Global South Alliance and Governments for an Inclusive Digital Agenda at The New School. Partnering with Data Privacy Brasil, Aapti Institute, and Paradigm Initiative, the event tackled intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and the Global Digital Compact. These discussions emphasized cooperative approaches to digital policy and inclusivity, setting the stage for later PCC programs.

Highlights from Global Events
Late in November, our Founding Director had the honor of presenting at the ICA Global Cooperative Conference in Delhi, India. Our heartfelt thanks to the organizers—it was incredible to connect with over 50 partners we had worked with. A few photos are here.

The soft launch of the United Nations’ 2025 International Year of Cooperatives took place on July 9, 2024, at the UN Headquarters in New York. It was organized by the UN Committee for the Promotion and Advancement of Cooperatives in collaboration with the Permanent Missions of Mongolia and Kenya to the United Nations, with the PCC proudly participating. Photos here.

RESEARCH
Guest editors Trebor Scholz, Johanna Mair, Mark Graham, Morshed Mannan, and Simon Pek are working on Solidarity Tech, a 2025 special issue of the Journal of Co-operative Organization and Management, showcasing research and case studies by fellows and faculty of the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy that examine how platform cooperatives address governance, sustainability, and equity challenges in the digital economy.

Academic Publications
The research produced by the fellows was especially consequential this year. ICDE fellow Santosh Kumar Padmanabhan, Head of Legislation at the ICA, published an urgent research paper LEGALIZE GLOBAL CO-OPS confronting the need for legal reforms to enable global cooperatives, particularly platform coops, to operate and incorporate in “Global South” countries. He also emphasized the importance of allowing people in these regions to join cooperatives beyond their state, region, or country, addressing current limitations.

Similarly, Eve O’Connor’s 2024 report, Principles for a Cooperative Technopolitics, builds on the foundational role of cooperatives as a counterforce to industrialization and monopolization. Published by ICDE, her essay advocates for re-politicizing cooperatives in the digital era, highlighting the potential of platform cooperatives to grapple with  present-day adversities.

Building on this theme of cooperatives’ transformative potential, Stefano Tortorici’s paper “Cooperative Roots for Climate Justice” asserts the necessity of redefining the political identity of cooperatives, emphasizing their potential, rooted in socialist principles, to combat climate injustice. This call for re-politicization resonated widely, echoing from many corners of the cooperative movement as a critical step for 2025.

Expanding the focus to the food delivery sector, Akkanut Wantanasombut’s report, Thai Delivery Reimagined, offers an in-depth analysis of the Tamsang-Tamsong initiative. Published by ICDE, the paper compares worker and multi-stakeholder platform cooperative models in their efforts to reform Thailand’s food delivery industry. It examines the co-op’s strategies for combating labor exploitation and mitigating environmental impact. Tamsang-Tamsong’s software is now ready to be deployed widely.

Shifting to the transportation sector, Udayan Tandon’s Driving Economic Justice: Cooperative Taxis in San Diego explores an experiment to create a public option in the taxi industry. Published by ICDE, the report analyzes a union-coop app platform that aims to deliver fairer wages and better working conditions for drivers in San Diego.

Anne-Pauline de Cler’s Food Commons: Nurture vs. Capture explores cooperative innovation in food systems through the Open Food Network’s efforts to scale local food economies using digital platforms, fostering equity while resisting extractive market forces. Shifting the focus from France to India, researchers in the PCC community highlight the Kerala Food Platform, a project that integrates cooperative farming with a federated digital network to support farmers, ensure fair pricing, and provide consumers with safe, traceable food.

In 2024, Trebor Scholz’s book Own This! was translated into Italian, with Mandarin and Thai translations underway. Verso Books hosted a roundtable discussion exploring its themes; you can read more about it here.

Data Storytelling
Shifting focus to the intersection of art and education, Priyanka Borar, an artist and ICDE fellow, brings a creative perspective to data literacy with her project, Waking Up to Data. This poetic and educational children’s book introduces the concept of data through vivid storytelling, set amidst India’s rural forest communities. Borar’s work exemplifies how artistic approaches can engage young readers with critical questions about data and its role in their lives. Access the book in flip book format, a large 124 MB, PDF (2.3 MB), or a large full-sized PDF.

Opinion Pieces
If you read just three opinion pieces that came out of the PCC this year, From Member-Managed LLCs to Cooperative Reform for Inclusive Economies should be one of them. Here we propose member-managed LLCs structured as worker cooperatives as a crucial stopgap measure to include marginalized groups—such as refugees and undocumented workers—in cooperative economies, with significant implications for both the United States and Africa, while advocating for legal reforms to achieve lasting equity. This essay followed on the heels of the June 2024 event, “Cooperative Identity and Innovative Organizational Forms: A Global Roundtable,” featuring speakers such as Anh-Thu Nguyen, Hagen Henrÿ, Santosh Kumar, Trebor Scholz, and Gowri J. Krishna.

This focus on expanding cooperative frameworks to include marginalized groups ties directly to Michelle Lee’s exploration of refugees in platform cooperatives. Her research delves into the unique obstacles refugees face, from legal barriers to structural inequities, while challenging conventional assumptions about who can fully participate in cooperative models. One key lesson from 2024 then is that there isn’t a single solution, but a multiplicity of models—“a silver buckshot, not a silver bullet”—for creating equitable and resilient systems in the digital economy.

A complementary focus on technology comes in Andrea Peña Calvin’s Cooperative DAOs Shift Management from Hierarchies to Networks where she examines how DAOs can use blockchain-based governance to align with cooperative principles, offering opportunities for transparency, autonomy, and collaborative decision-making. Providing another angle, Eli Zeger critiques venture capital-backed projects like the “Ownership Economy,” arguing that they co-opt cooperative ideals while reinforcing capitalist hierarchies and failing to deliver true decentralization or solidarity.

This tension between technology’s promise to assist and its appropriation by capitalist interests finds a counterpoint in Katarzyna Cieslik’s The Need for Collective Action for Digital Tractor Lending Platforms in Ghana. Her work contrasts cooperative farmer-based organizations with venture capital-backed “Uber for tractors” platforms, exploring how digital tools and local networks can collaboratively address mechanization challenges faced by smallholder farmers.

Nigerian content moderator for OpenAI and Facebook, Kauna Malgwi, who spoke at the Digital Africa Rising conference, has drawn attention to the hidden struggles of tech workers. Her widely read article, Why Cooperatives for Content Moderators and Tech Workers in Africa?, confronts these challenges with sharp, unflinching detail. In the piece, Malgwi, a Nigerian content moderator, reveals the grueling realities of her work and proposes worker cooperatives as a solution. She argues that a co-op for content moderators could strengthen solidarity, provide critical mental health support, and secure fairer labor conditions. By doing so, her argument reframes the discussion around tech labor, demanding a deeper examination of how these vital but overlooked workers are treated.

Malgwi’s call for worker cooperatives to address the struggles of tech labor underscores the potential of these models to face systemic challenges in industries like content moderation. Her arguments align with broader discussions about where and how cooperative models can succeed—and the importance of learning from their failures. This dual focus is explored in Post-Mortem for Ampled, where Trebor Scholz and Morshed Mannan examine the trajectory of the artist-owned cooperative platform Ampled. Co-founder Austin Robey reflects on the obstacles faced by such ventures, including resource scarcity, market viability, and public perception, while sharing lessons that could inform future efforts. These themes were further developed during the Platform Cooperativism Consortium’s May 9 event, Lessons from Failed Platform Co-ops, where Robey and others analyzed projects like Ampled to better understand how cooperatives can grow stronger by grappling with their shortcomings.

Maïmonatou Mar’s Why French Nannies Are Building Their Own Platform Cooperative recounts how nannies in France have come together to form a cooperative platform aimed at improving working conditions, ensuring stable employment, and strengthening relationships with families. This initiative highlights how platform cooperatives can address the specific needs of workers in traditionally undervalued professions

The range of topics we covered in 2024 was extensive. These included a comparison between tech worker cooperatives in Argentina and the UK, reimagining online sex work, and the development of Punjab’s collective ecosystem. We explored governance hiccups within CoopCycle, a platform co-op for Uyghur Food Couriers, examined the political philosophy of workplace technologies, and spotlighted novel approaches to e-hailing in Kenya. Other pieces focused on building a commons-oriented economy through open cooperativism and strategies for expanding the cooperative movement beyond its “walled garden” by engaging with public institutions, universities, trade groups, and tech companies. We also presented data cooperatives as democratic, community-driven alternatives for nonprofits and social service agencies. And there is more.

PRACTICAL ADVICE
Each year, we advise hundreds of collectives worldwide as they reimagine ownership and governance in their industries, with examples from 2024 spanning Ghana, Tanzania, the Bay Area in the United States, and Iran. In 2024, this included supporting the BF Couriers Association in Ghana, among others. The BF Couriers Association is working to create Ghana’s first worker-owned delivery platform, partnering with CoopCycle to customize their app that ensures fair wages and collective ownership for couriers, challenging the exploitative practices of gig economy giants. Their movement has gained traction through strikes, public alliances, and a strong commitment to political organization, tackling declining wages and inequitable policies in a sector dominated by Bolt and Yango. We were proud to help bring the association to the Digital Africa Rising conference, where they shared their journey with an international audience.

In Iran, Kaseb Cooperative, set to launch in 2025, is the country’s first platform cooperative experiment. It combines elements of traditional Islamic profit-sharing systems like Mudarabah with modern digital transparency, creating an online marketplace that supports small local businesses. With commitments from 200 members and 36 businesses, Kaseb enables consumers to shop locally through its app, distributing 95% of profits evenly among its users while retaining 5% for operations. By integrating real-time financial transparency, Kaseb aims to restore trust in cooperatives and offer a fairer alternative to large platforms like Amazon, which retain significantly higher fees from sellers.

In Tanzania, Enyorata Loviluku, a data cooperative initiated by Maasai women in Arusha, has evolved from a small table banking group into a platform leveraging digitized financial records to secure collateral-free loans for its members. Using a mobile application developed with support from the Aapti Institute and Data 2X, the cooperative aggregates transaction data—such as weekly contributions, loans, and repayments—into a credible credit profile. This collective financial history allowed the group to negotiate successfully with Mwanga Hakika Bank, securing their first loans. By combining transparent data management with targeted training in Swahili and Maasai, the initiative equips women to expand their businesses and gain financial independence in a traditionally exclusionary system.

In the Bay Area, StyleBee is hoping to reshape the American beauty industry by splitting into a cooperative and a tech company. With 5,000 beauty professionals gaining ownership and autonomy, StyleBee demonstrates how platform cooperatives can address systemic flaws in the gig economy while fostering equity and sustainability.

EDUCATION
The 2024 courses build on PCC’s 2023 collaboration with NCBA CLUSA, connecting underserved farmers and ranchers, primarily in the southern United States, to the platform coop ecosystem and exploring sensible ready-to-implement solutions for small cooperative farms.
Guiding Young Farmers (Aug 12, 2024)
Open-Agriculture, AI, and Data (July 25, 2024)
Seeding Tomorrow: Generative AI, Farming Data, and the Commons (April 25)

WHAT’S NEXT
In 2025, the UN’s International Year of Cooperatives, we will expand our courses

This spring and fall, we’ll host Eco Radicals, a research seminar. In the fall, we’ll debut a major online course dedicated to exploring the digital solidarity economy—what we call Solidarity Tech—in collaboration with international institutions. If this aligns with your interests, we’d love to hear from you. This spring, we’ll also publish the PCC Impact Report with metrics.

We have also submitted several research grant proposals, including an especially ambitious one that demanded much of our focus throughout 2024. We hope to share updates on this soon—fingers crossed. Looking outward, we’re joining forces with PCC Thailand to design courses that will be offered in 60 rural districts, with plans to extend our work to Chile and Australia in 2025. Lastly, we will welcome our next cohort of ICDE fellows in March, with the call for applications opening early in the new year. 

SOCIALS
We’re active on Instagram! Check out the latest ICDE community papers in the “ICDE Research” highlight folder at instagram.com/platformcoops. We’ve also recently joined Bluesky—find us at @pcc-global.bsky.social and our director at @trebors2025.bsky.social. Still on Twitter/X? You can follow us there too at @platformcoop and @pcc_global, though we’re not as active there.