Concurrent Session 8: Social Solidarity Economy & Cooperative Movements Meet AI

Second round of concurrent sessions

Format: Short presentations and audience discussion (10 minutes per presenter)

Speakers: Shigeru Tanaka, Enkhtsolmon Batchuluun, Talgar Bayan, Waleed Khalil Ahmed

Enkhtsolmon Batchuluun draws on research into how second-language learners use AI-assisted Chinese academic writing tools to ask what linguistic justice would mean for underrepresented languages such as Mongolian. She examines the khot ail, a traditional Mongolian herding community in which households pool resources and share responsibilities, as a practical precedent for governing language AI: who belongs, who maintains the infrastructure, and how communities prevent extraction without reciprocity.

Talgar Bayan proposes a community-governed framework for Kazakh-language AI: a data cooperative that preserves contributors’ consent and licensing rights, community-written rules for model behavior, and a verifiable record of whether those rules are followed. A preliminary multi-agent study tests whether AI models can adequately represent a Kazakh university language community when drafting these rules. He also examines how Kazakhstan’s AI law could make room for collective governance.

Shigeru Tanaka examines the regional impacts of Japanese investment in Asia’s digital economy. Drawing on his work with PARC and the Fair Finance Guide Japan coalition, he traces the investment structures behind the rapid spread of platform apps across Asia, linking Saudi capital channeled through SoftBank founder Son Masayoshi to the exploitation of platform workers. He asks what a solidarity digital economy would demand of the financiers behind these platforms.

Waleed Khalil Ahmed presents a framework in which cooperatives and community organizations run independently governed AI systems while collaborating across institutions. Data stays local, while federated learning enables shared model improvement. Community decisions become enforceable technical rules covering permitted uses, human appeals, resource limits, veto, rollback, and exit. A prototype explores applications in food systems, circular economy cooperatives, worker-defined scheduling, underrepresented languages, and credit unions. The framework asks how collective authority can become an engineering property of AI infrastructure.

Community notes

Reporter 1: Shigeru Tanaka
Reporter 2:

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