Roots of Resilience

Building Platform Co-Ops for Feminist Futures, Local Economies, Climate Justice, and Sustainable Agriculture.

The “Roots of Resilience” conference explores the potential of platform co-ops in promoting feminist futures, climate justice, and sustainable agriculture. Platform co-ops are democratically owned and governed digital platforms that provide a means for individuals and communities to cooperatively own and manage digital services. The conference aims to examine how these models can be leveraged to empower local collectives, self-help groups, producer organizations, worker collectives, etc.

Roots of Resilience is intended to be an inclusive and vibrant dialogic space where scholars, practitioners, and fellow travelers of the platform cooperativism movement reflect on new visions for a just and sustainable digital future, exploring new ways of working together, learning and unlearning, and contemplating cutting-edge institutional change. Participants can expect an in-depth peek into the exciting intersections between traditional community and cooperative institutions and new-age data cooperativism, focused on an alternative grammar of practice for the global South. 

We aim for the Conference to be a ground for innovative ideas (such as fair and sustainable design principles for alternative platform models). A blend of practitioner and theoretical perspectives, the Conference will allow space for women’s associations, farmer organizations, co-ops, self-help groups, students – to share and learn.

These discussions will be grounded in themes such as food justice, regenerative agriculture, financing, public support,  etc., – analyzing how community-embedded platform models can pave the way for a new economic future. 

The conference aims to showcase scholarly work on platform design and technical protocols, distributed cooperative organizations and emerging endeavours in the South that comprise public-community collaborations.

We aspire to building tech for a people and planet-centric future based on values of collaboration, cooperation and solidarity.