“Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet” Link Mega-List

With November’s event come and gone, we have assembled a list of some of the articles and media resulting from “ Platform Cooperativism: Building the Cooperative Internet.” We want to thank everyone in attendance — in person and watching via live stream — for their dedication and passion. For those of you who did not get a chance to attend, we encourage you to check out the materials linked below which include post-conference write-ups, live coverage, image galleries, and archived recordings of every lecture given at the event.

Articles

• Writeup by Darren Sharp (@dasharp), including the launch of the Platform Cooperativism Consortium
  
• Event highlights by Jonas Algers (@JonasAlgers)
• Enric Senabre (@esenabre) and Ricard Espelt (@ricardespelt) offer a summary of approaches to the design and development of platform cooperatives with a focus on the final day’s “unconference“
  
• Live coverage by Dorothy Howard (@DorothyR_Howard), reporting for e-Flux, with a host of links mentioned by different speakers
  
• Discussion of the conference and a collection of passages from important texts about platform cooperativism by Ewen Chardronnet (@ewenchardronnet) in English and French
  
• A published transcript of the talk by Wolfgang Kowalsky (@kokowo1) mounting a critique of platform capitalism
  
• The conference experience of Peter Bosmans (@febecoop), Febecoop, Belgium (Dutch)
  

Media

• All recorded footage, filmed by the Internet Society, can be found on the Internet Archive. You can also download a torrent file of all video files. These recordings also remain on the Internet Society’s Livestream channel where they were first broadcast.
  
• Collection of photos on Flickr
  
• Images posted to Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference
• Radio feature about the event by Deutschlandfunk produced by Patrick Stegemann (@petterich) (in German)
• All image tweets and text tweets made on Twitter with the #platformcoop hashtag during the conference

Selected Presentations

Green Taxi

Jason Weiner of Colorado Cooperative Developers discusses the success of Green Taxi Cooperative, a new union taxicab cooperative in the Denver/Boulder metro area. The company’s app has the convenience and functionality of its venture-capital backed competitors, shares 100% ownership among its members, and is now the second largest worker cooperative in the country.

The Union-Coop Model

This panel, moderated by Trebor Scholz, featured speakers from a number of different unions: Palak Shah of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Dawn Gearhart of Teamsters Local 117, Lieza Dessein and Frisia Donders of SMart Coop, Annette Mühlberg of United Services Union in Berlin, Michael Peck of 1worker1vote.org and Mondragon, and Christian Sweeney of the AFL-CIO. They discussed the union-coop model and the challenges it will have to overcome to succeed.

Towards an Open Social Economy

In this talk, Yochai Benkler elaborates the economic conditions that have resulted in a crisis for democratic capitalism. Arguing that recent far-right populism is a response to an oligarchic capitalism which was born in the 1970s, Benkler claims that platform cooperatives have the potential to be a core component of an alternative, left-wing trajectory into a market economy re-embedded with social relations. He stresses the importance of winning an ideological war in this time of uncertainty, not on paper but through real-world organizations engaging in cooperative social production.

The Digital Democracy Manifesto

A cheeky and informative talk by Richard Barbrook discussing the path to the inclusion of platform cooperatives as a key point in the Digital Democracy Manifesto proposed by UK Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

MIDATA.coop
In his short presentation Ulrich Genicke introduced MIDATA.coop, a project that enables citizens to securely store, manage and control access to their personal data by helping them to establish and own national/regional not-for-profit MIDATA cooperatives. MIDATA’s initial focus will be on health related data since these are most sensitive and valuable for one’s personal health. MIDATA cooperatives act as the fiduciaries of their members’ data. As MIDATA members, citizens can visualize and analyze their personal data.

There were so many remarkable talks; these is merely a small selection. Here are a few more talks

Thomas Doennebrink’s report from Berlin and Mexico City
Nathan Schneider Interviews Professor Esther N. Gicheru
Mayo Forell Fuster