Concurrent Session 4: Regional Solidarities

Format: Case in Progress (15 min each: ~7 min present + ~7 min audience)

Speakers: Bank Ngamarunchot, CoAssembly: Tzu-Yun Wei, Munus Shih, I-Hao Liao, James Gomez, Jose Mari Luzarraga

Presenters from Taiwan, across Asia, and Europe show how workers, civil society organizations, and social enterprises are building collective power around AI.

We treat solidarity as a practice. Every case asks: Who shares time or resources? Who makes the decisions? Who carries the costs? What obligations do participants have to one another?

CoAssembly’s contribution, jointly presented by Tzu-Yun Wei, Munus Shih, and I-Hao Liao, explores how design workers in Taiwan can retain collective ownership of the value they create. Drawing on their design cooperative, the presenters examine educational and cooperative practices for organizing workers, building shared infrastructure, and connecting cooperatives through federated networks. They ask how solidarity can extend beyond individual organizations and how shared infrastructures can help designers reimagine collaboration and their relationships with technology.

James Gomez explores how civil society organizations across Asia face a dual reality as AI transforms public spheres. AI tools offer efficiency gains for under-resourced newsrooms and rights advocates, yet unchecked deployments threaten digital rights and amplify state surveillance. Drawing on Asia Centre’s research and AI Hub, he introduces principled caution, in which rights-focused actors adopt AI selectively while safeguarding institutional trust and human rights, and outlines frameworks for building AI solidarity around democracy, human rights, and equitable tech governance. The presentation connects to the governance, application, and civil society layers of the Solidarity Stack in the Majority World.

Jose Mari Luzarraga of Mondragon University presents ELEO, a data cooperative and observatory of entrepreneurial learning ecosystems that is just getting started. Its first dataset is 18 years of records from the MTA-LEINN entrepreneurship program, and its design builds on Salus.Coop, the Barcelona health data cooperative. He asks the room which data cooperative examples and cooperative protocols would fit ELEO best. He also briefly introduces GUZAINKOOP, a cooperative builder for home care for elderly people in Gipuzkoa, the Basque province that is home to the Mondragon cooperatives.

Community notes

Reporter 1: Jose Mari Luzarraga
Reporter 2:

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