Digital Co-op Fractals: Iterations, Patterns, Questions

  • Nov 9, 2019 10:45AM–12:00PM

  • Tishman Auditorium - Room U100, Ground Floor
    The University Center
    63 Fifth Avenue, NYC

***Archival video for this session is hyperlinked in the names of the speakers below.***

For this session, we are tracing emerging patterns within the cooperative digital ecosystem. We asked Juliet Schor, Joseph Blasi, Gar Alperovitz, Jack Qiu, and Melissa Hoover to each pose a question, which they’ll then answer for 10 minutes. Then, we will open it up to everybody for a People’s Q&A. Here are the questions that will guide our discussion: 

How best can platform cooperatives contribute to fundamental community-based system-wide political-economic transformation? What are the particular challenges that platform cooperatives face? How will the quality of the jobs for the workers you expect to work in the cooperative you are designing be better than similar jobs in non-worker-owned firms? What are the essential elements of platforms that aggregate the power and resources of workers rather than atomizing them? How to start a platform co-op while minimizing the dangers of an authoritarian crackdown? 

Facilitated by Luciana Bruno & Amelia Evans

File Swap
Would you like to dig deeper, learn more about the discussed topics, or have documents to share? Download PDFs of the presentations, background readings, and/or upload your own materials to this folder

Concluded with an Appeal by Hal Plotkin

Speakers

  • Hal Plotkin Former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education

  • Jack Linchuan Qiu Professor, Platform Cooperativism Consortium HK, Chinese University of Hong Kong

  • Melissa Hoover Executive Director of the Democracy at Work Institute

  • Amelia Evans Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy

  • Joseph Blasi Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing, Rutgers University

  • Gar Alperovitz Co-founder Democracy Collaborative

  • Luciana Bruno Brazilian journalist

  • Juliet Schor Professor of Sociology at Boston College

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